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Senator Proposes 5% Tax on Web Transactions
rhet writes "A South Carolina Senator has proposed a bill that would levy a 5% federal tax on all sales conducted over the web." I guess we kinda know its only a matter
of time, but its still a bitch. But Uncle Sam wants his piece.
Now then, I realize that much of this e-mail will never be seen by the Senators, but the noise on the mail servers will be. That said, however, don't even begin to think about sending flames to these addresses. These are not the people we want to alienate -- these are the ones who can prevent Senator Hollings mistake from ever seeing the legislative light of day, e.g., killing it before it even has a chance to breathe. So if you are going to write, clarity and sanity counts, vulgarity and rants don't!!
Here's the addresses for the Senate Finance Committee Members:
- Roth(DE)
- Moynihan NY)
- Chafee (RI)
- Baucus (MT)
- Grassley (IA)
- Rockefeller (WV)
- Hatch (UT)
- Breaux (LA)
- Murkowski (AK)
- Conrad (ND)
- Nickles (OK)
- Bob Graham (FL)
- Phil Gramm (TX)
- Bryan (NV)
- Lott (MS)
- Kerrey (NE)
- Jeffords (VT)
- Robb (VA)
- Mack (FL)
- Thompson(TN)
Note: this was a lot of hand typing, so if I messed up an URL, I apologize.The full list of pages and addresses can be found at: http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index.cfm.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Right now, the parties are playing PR games with taxes. While they would like to pass real changes, the Republicans know that the tax cuts they're passing will never become law with a Democrat in the White House, and the Democrats know that a national Internet sales tax will never become law until they control both houses of Congress.
If Republicans really wanted to cut taxes, they would pass their massive tax cut as a bunch of separate bills, each with one cut--the lower rates, capital gains cuts, marriage penalty relief, and estate tax elimination. Then Clinton would sign one or two and veto the rest, but at least we would get some tax cuts. Of course, that's bad politics because then it's easier to portray some of those as tax cuts for the rich, playing into the class warfare Democrats always use when tax cuts are proposed.
Well the problem is that the US Constitution specificly reserves to the Federal government the right to regulate and tax interstate buisness. That is why interstate catalog sales don't get taxed. There is no real legal reason why there could not be a national sales tax.
We have never had one as far as I know and probably won't any time soon. But congress *COULD* enact one if they wanted to.
Remember one of the main reasons of the US Revolution and the English Civil war was to enforce the idea that the Legislature had to consent to taxes.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State.
That's in pretty plain language. They'd have to come up with an amendment to get around that one.
The proposed Internet tax is nothing special. Until telephone orders are taxed why should Internet transactions be taxed?
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Of course, that kind of logic is irrelevant -- the real point is to increase taxes. The more kinds of taxes there are and the more sources and justifications those taxes have, the easier it is for people not to notice just how much they are being taxed. And, the easier it is for them to support taxes that they do not directly pay.
For example, taxing the manufacturing of automobiles only raises the cost of purchasing cars -- on which you will also pay sales tax. The net effect of taxing such production is to unfairly burden domestic goods while giving foreign goods from lands with lower production taxes an advantage.
The whole point of putting half of our social security taxes on the employer's side of the ledger is simply to make the citizens think they are paying less tax. The costs to the employer, however, are the same whether the whole amount is put in your column, the employer's column, or split as they are now. The cost to hire you is the same and the employer knows how much you cost. Just like the self-employed, the employee is paying this tax by his or her labor.
Now, if all taxes were accumulated in one big tax -- without even the fiction of claiming the employer is paying some -- we would finally know how much tax we pay and we might offer more resistance.
Internet-specific taxes are just another source of revenue. The taxing opportunity here is to divide and conquer the tax base by convincing the non-connected that we Internet users are not paying our fair share. Further, we are probably rich as well, considering recent high-profile Internet property acquisitions.
Hide some taxes, make others confusingly indirect, use the popular programs to justify additional program-specific taxes, and even call a few taxes "fees". And, most important of all, make each new tax apply to a minority of taxpayers so the remaining majority will support, even demand, it. That is the plan.
The proposed Internet tax is just a small piece in a much larger and very successful taxing scheme.
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Geeky modern art T-shirts
If we here in the USA had the
right to vote
I don't understand your comment. Last time I checked, we directly elect our senators and representatives.
If you mean that we should vote on the tax itself, holding a referendum on every single change in the tax code would be impractical.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to
dump everybody in congress every 2 years?
Your representative is up for re-election every 2 years. Each of your senators faces an election every 6 years. You can dump them if you'd like, by voting for someone else.
A better solution: you should tell your elected officials how you feel about this issue. We can complain about our government all we want, but if we don't inform our representatives of our wishes, how can we expect Congress to heed them? Write your senator today and tell them how you feel about this tax proposal. (Be polite.) With the amount of people who visit Slashdot, I'm sure this would make an impact.
And also, people should make sure they vote! We live in an age of low voter turnouts. You cannot expect to have your wishes reflected in a democracy if you do not exercise this fundamental right.
The DMCA--for corporations, the best copyright law money can buy.
do you REALLY want to live in a county with no public schools
The public school system does a lousy job, so yes, I'd like to see them privatized. But even if we are going to have government schools, why should they be funded at the federal level? The Feds just take a cut and send it right back where it came from, with some strings attached. I don't see the point.
no law enforcement
Like the NSA's "counter-terrorism" activities? Or the FBI's murder of a peaceful religious cult in Waco, Texas? Or their sniping women, children, and dogs at Ruby Ridge? Or their locking up hundreds of thousands of non-violent pot smokers? Or the FDA's harrassing of alternative medical pracititioners?
The list goes on practically forever. I'll agree that we need some law enforcement services, but the Feds have too much power as it is. I'd be happy to see The ATF, FBI, NSA, and most of the other alphabet soup agencies disbanded.
public healthcare
The government is responsible for the skyrocketing costs and lousy services of our health care system. I don't want them to get more control over it.
social services
Like the pyramid scheme called social security? I'll pass, thanks. I'd rather put my money into a private system that has a shot at giving me something back when I retire.
no military defence.
The US has been attacked once in the last 100 years. I don't think that we need the ridicuously large government to protect us from invasion. What our military has done is not protect us from harm, but gone around the world bombing innocent civilians, propping up petty dictators, subsidizing the militaries of Europe and Japan, and generally wasting our money while simultaneously makeing the entire third world hate our guts. You wanna know why we are always getting attacked by terrorists? because our government has screwed over some ethnic group in almost every country in the world. If we didn't undertake to get involved in every petty conflict, we wouldn't be the target of every single terrorist group.
So no, I don't think I'm getting my money's worth, and I don't think that more taxes are going to do any good.