People say "never wrestle with a pig, because people can't tell the difference, and the pig likes it". So good advice to the pig is to wrestle with the best human they can find.
WorldNet Daily is a rag. The Republican corporate media tactic for attacking well-regarded messengers is to find a Republican messenger, no matter how incomparable, with one obvious characteristic in common with the target, then set the two up in their corporate media as "opponents". Like setting up Hillary Clinton with Condoleeza Rice because they're both "women in politics". That competition immediately lowers the higher stature target, and often raises the lower stature target for a bonus.
In this case, they're pairing WND with Google. Fans of the trashy, rightwing WND will happily say that Google loses, and most people, who haven't formed an specific opinion of either, will associate them as peers - to Google's detriment. The few Google fans were lost to the Republicans anyway, especially with the independent reporting Google generally features, but at least they now will get branded as "worse than WND".
These comparisons have nothing to do with Google's actual quality. They have to do with "guilt by association", in the Karl Rove version so popular the past decade called "guilt by opposition".
Because the same groups of theocrats trying to pray Mrs Schiavo's brain back from the dead have actually succeeded in thwarting America's euthanasia movement. Even people who face an horrible, immediate terminal condition ("certain agonizing death") with determination to spare themselves and their family the fear, pain and expense with dignity can't get help to kill themselves quickly and painlessly. Because America's Christaliban has already got more political power in shaping the laws.
Instead, "Compassionate Conservatism" demands people get tortured medically as long as pharmacos have a legal patient. When Republicans need political lifesupport, they'll move heaven and Earth to invade people's privacy even to interfere with what little protection we have for letting a dead person's body join them after a decade of medical and legal consensus.
I just gave an example of a single class of services. There are more services apart from my example. The services in my example form a network of varied services. And within that network, as well as the other more or less directly consumed services, there's an entire government infrastructure that the telecommuters use.
Some states charge tolls on highways. Others subsidize the highways with other fees generated by the out of state travellers, including Federal subsidy.
The fact is that those services generate costs. How to pay them? You're refusing to pay for services that must be paid. And you're not alone. The country has a $10TRILLION debt from that kind of refusal.
You apparently don't realize that telecommuting is different from traditionally working from home. Because you're simultaneously working at your employer's location.
You also don't know how to spell "ridiculous". Or what "absurd" means. Or how to back up such obnoxious claims beyond just asserting them. Or how to justify the leap from muttering "absurd" to deducing "government thinking".
So there's no sense explaining once again in this tiresome post how telecommuters consume services where they're working virtually. You'll just screw it up beyond recognition.
What do you think keeps telecommuter paychecks coming, corporate honor? Telecommuters are even less naturally protected from exploitation than in-person workers, and the local labor pool. Locals can hear through the grapevine or media not to trust a local employer. Telecommuters are even more isolated and easily replaced from the larger labor pool. It's the local justice department that keeps the employers "honest".
A Value Added Tax is a kind of sales tax. There are other ways to charge sales tax, but a VAT is OK, when the different kinds of transactions aren't just a way to game the system.
The ECU didn't have a market value. The currencies used to compute the synthetic value of the ECU had market values. But unifying the currency and trading it in an actual market as the euro changed those values, as demonstrated by its rapid plunge against the dollar to $0.82.
The natural value of a real currency was about $0.82, The synthetic value of a synthetic currency was $1.18. Decision by a committee of economists, bankers and politicians is a synthetic valuation, as proven by the test of reality in the market.
You've just added some more of the costs that don't apply. But no one has refuted the costs the city has in protecting telecommuters' ability to get paid for their work.
Nor said how to pay for it without taxing telecommuters. Some have said the NYC employer should pay, but they already don't, and the bills we're discussing don't do anything about that.
So as many times as "what costs?" gets asked in this thread, the answer is still the same. Why can't people even read the first sentence of the first post, repeated several times in the thread, when trying to argue with it?
No, the quality of legal and justice services is much better in NYC than in Jersey City. NYC has better value for money spent, due to our economies of scale and the better people we attract to manage it, but we spend more producing much more and better services. Which is one reason why people want to telecommute here: those investments in making this a better place to do business pay off in more money to spend on labor, including telecommuters.
No matter how you spin it, there's no way to say that Jersey City's services are equal to NYC's. Their quality is much lower, and our cost is higher. Someone's got to pay it. The corporations won't, the residents shouldn't pay extra for telecommuters. It's simple: telecommuters should pay for services they consume.
Anonymous clueless Coward, I'm a rich guy who knows how taxes and finance work. And the English language. So here's another hint: I've never defended double taxation, and even repudiated the implication in several of the posts.
I agree that telecommuters shouldn't pay the full tax in both their physical and their virtual location.
But the total tax bill should depend on what their jurisdictions spend on them. That might not mean the telecommuter bill is the same as the local worker.
I kicked off this whole annoying thread by asking "How should NYC pay for the costs of legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers while they're telecommunting to NYC businesses?
The real conspicuous absence in the thread is any way to pay for them, or even any recognition that they exist - even while quoting my mention of one example.
Guess again. Not only does NYC spend a lot of money defending itself from "cybercrime", but its defense protects lots more than just our own companies, residents and tele/commuters. As usual, we're working hard to keep the whole country working.
I said "legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers ". When the telecommuter's NYC employer doesn't send the pay, NYC's services protect the telecommuter. There are lots of other services like that.
Of course, there are lots of services telecommuters don't consume. They shouldn't have to pay the same taxes, and I never said they did. In fact, telecommuting offers lots of efficiencies in service consumption that should make their overall cost nationwide much lower.
But not zero. That's why I asked how those services are to be paid. No one has yet responded to that simple question. Nor has anyone but you recognized that corporate undertaxation is a problem, even though solving it is much harder (ie, not bloody likely) to solve than fixing the telecommuter tax.
As I keep repeating in this thread, corporations don't pay taxes sufficient to cover their costs.
Delaware and Maryland don't charge tolls on those roads, because their budget model doesn't require it due to alternatives. But NJ does charge tolls on its roads.
The income tax is a terrible way to tax people. I prefer a sales tax, which is simpler, easier to control, and based on the benefit people derive from the system whose bills we're paying.
Corporations don't pay their fair share, and won't be giving up the welfare their power grabs them anytime soon. We're talking about a new law that would also hand free services to telecommuters, too. And that's unacceptable, because it's economically impossible.
How about someone actually answers my question in this thread, rather than the dozens of misdirections I've charitably warded off? You've come closest, so I'll requery you.
How should those services telecommuters consume be paid?
Yeah, get corporations to give up their welfare. No chance. There is a chance to keep telecommuters paying for service demands they generate, by stopping or fixing the bills we're discussing.
As I've posted again and again in this thread, I'm not saying telecommuters have to pay the same amount of taxes as local workers - just not zero.
If you want to talk about NY getting a free lunch, I suggest you look at how much we pay to subsidize the rest of the country, especially places that offer less services. Which welfare state do you live in?
"If the company is "underpaying" taxes, as defined by "paying less in taxes than they consume in services," then the government of New York should man up and go ahead and raise taxes & revoke the tax breaks it's given to companies."
Corporations also evade taxes, but mostly they do it legally. Transforming our political system is even less likely than fixing our tax system. Until we replace either or both, like with the sales tax system I favor, we have to patch it. Patching it merely to drop telecommuters from paying for services they continue to consume, like the protections of their paychecks from deadbeat employers, just kills the protector.
Every reply post disagreeing with my post has ignored the actual reality of taxes, service cost and politics. It's like people think our society is some kind of ideal libertarian machine that just has a little bit of inefficient sand in its gears, that cleared away will just return fairness to humans. Maybe more people need to actually work physically in New York City, where reality is unavoidable.
Look, I'm talking about the obvious case where raising prices violates the law, as I mentioned necessitating legal/justice service. Like raising them despite contractual obligation, or beyond monopoly tariffs. I think you're projecting your lawyer fixation on me, and I'm not going to bother grinding out posts to meet your parsing requirements.
Yes you did. And now you're ignoring another fact I mentioned, that corporations don't pay enough taxes for their required services already - where they consume more than just the electricity for their remote access machine.
You've burned two chances to say something serious. Why should I continue to reply?
An Arizonan working for an NYC company makes that company bigger, requiring more legal infrastructure in NYC. Corporations don't pay enough taxes for governments to service them already, and raising those taxes would be harder than even taxing telecommuters. Unfortunately, many of the corporate tax breaks are produced by unaccountable politicians, like Giuliani after he was no longer eligible for reelection.
Distributed consumers of telecommuter labor make the tax/service problem more complex, naturally - just like they make everything more complex with their increased complexity. But corporations are incorporated in a single state, with offices in a single location. Telecommuter taxes are far from the first attempt to exploit corporate virtuality to evade taxes or other liabilities. Taxing telecommuters is just another example.
FWIW, I never said telecommuters would pay the full income tax, or the same taxes, as local workers. Taxing telecommuters appropriately doesn't mean picking either full or no taxes. Appropriately taxed to their service costs, telecommuters offer many benefits to their remote locations. Including flexibility in face of disasters and regional economics, as well as offering a much larger pool of labor in which telecommuters compete for work. As well as road/bridge/tunnel/transit maintenance and capacity, which are usually net losses.
FWIW, I'm continuing the debate regardless of whether you learn anything from it. I'm taking your side seriously, to ensure that my vision accommodates both the economic realities and popular (if even weak) criticisms and concerns. You're the one who's suggested the debate isn't serious in every one of your posts, which certainly doesn't encourage any hope that you wwill learn anything from it.
You're kidding about the equality of NYC government services to Jersey City government services, right? After all, your last sentence exactly supports the reasons for charging the Hoboken telecommuter taxes, just like the 5th Ave telecommuter. Except the part where the interstate commerce and telecom protection costs more in crossing the river.
Just for starters, Jersey City is mostly ghetto, NYC is only slightly ghetto. Jersey City public transit is subsidized more by NY than by NJ. The list is endless. And though Spitzer is doing a good job, he certainly didn't suddenly lift NY service delivery above that of Jersey City, which has been the pits for at least half a century, and never compared to NYC.
I didn't say you should pay the same taxes to NYC as if you physically commuted. And I didn't say that your company's distributed offices made taxing it to pay the cost of servicing it easy. But there is of course an appropriate solution. Not necessarily analyzable or presentable in a couple of Slashdot posts by me, but there's nothing paradoxical about the situation - except when one consumes services when telecommuting without paying for them.
I've posted elsewhere about the superiority of a sales tax system. It also addresses your concerns. Sales tax you paid on your rent or purchase of your home would pay for local services, as well as sales tax on local purchases you consume. Sales tax you collected on your labor would be split between your physical location (home) and where the work was consumed. Your example calls for a complex split on the consumption side, but that's a cost of complexity like other costs incurred by the complex organization. Not paying for services that enable you to sell your work there prohibits offering them - an untenable setup that would default to NYC residents paying to subsidize your work.
Just because you can't see the services supporting the receiving end of your product, doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't get paid for. If corporations paid taxes proportionate to their cost, or benefit, maybe you and your corporation would pay only your respective taxes. But they don't, so you have to.
Just moving you out of the corporation's service area doesn't make those costs go away. But, as you point out, they can be lower. So that tax should be different. And the total costs should reduce, reducing the taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess the less obnoxious version of your comment would be "because $100 computer users don't need an enterprise OS, just a personal one".
OTOH, users of such puny computers have even more improvement than most in combining the power of multiple computers into a networked enterprise.
People say "never wrestle with a pig, because people can't tell the difference, and the pig likes it". So good advice to the pig is to wrestle with the best human they can find.
WorldNet Daily is a rag. The Republican corporate media tactic for attacking well-regarded messengers is to find a Republican messenger, no matter how incomparable, with one obvious characteristic in common with the target, then set the two up in their corporate media as "opponents". Like setting up Hillary Clinton with Condoleeza Rice because they're both "women in politics". That competition immediately lowers the higher stature target, and often raises the lower stature target for a bonus.
In this case, they're pairing WND with Google. Fans of the trashy, rightwing WND will happily say that Google loses, and most people, who haven't formed an specific opinion of either, will associate them as peers - to Google's detriment. The few Google fans were lost to the Republicans anyway, especially with the independent reporting Google generally features, but at least they now will get branded as "worse than WND".
These comparisons have nothing to do with Google's actual quality. They have to do with "guilt by association", in the Karl Rove version so popular the past decade called "guilt by opposition".
Because the same groups of theocrats trying to pray Mrs Schiavo's brain back from the dead have actually succeeded in thwarting America's euthanasia movement. Even people who face an horrible, immediate terminal condition ("certain agonizing death") with determination to spare themselves and their family the fear, pain and expense with dignity can't get help to kill themselves quickly and painlessly. Because America's Christaliban has already got more political power in shaping the laws.
Instead, "Compassionate Conservatism" demands people get tortured medically as long as pharmacos have a legal patient. When Republicans need political lifesupport, they'll move heaven and Earth to invade people's privacy even to interfere with what little protection we have for letting a dead person's body join them after a decade of medical and legal consensus.
If it aims to be so cheap, why use Fedora instead of CentOS?
I just gave an example of a single class of services. There are more services apart from my example. The services in my example form a network of varied services. And within that network, as well as the other more or less directly consumed services, there's an entire government infrastructure that the telecommuters use.
Some states charge tolls on highways. Others subsidize the highways with other fees generated by the out of state travellers, including Federal subsidy.
The fact is that those services generate costs. How to pay them? You're refusing to pay for services that must be paid. And you're not alone. The country has a $10TRILLION debt from that kind of refusal.
You apparently don't realize that telecommuting is different from traditionally working from home. Because you're simultaneously working at your employer's location.
You also don't know how to spell "ridiculous". Or what "absurd" means. Or how to back up such obnoxious claims beyond just asserting them. Or how to justify the leap from muttering "absurd" to deducing "government thinking".
So there's no sense explaining once again in this tiresome post how telecommuters consume services where they're working virtually. You'll just screw it up beyond recognition.
What do you think keeps telecommuter paychecks coming, corporate honor? Telecommuters are even less naturally protected from exploitation than in-person workers, and the local labor pool. Locals can hear through the grapevine or media not to trust a local employer. Telecommuters are even more isolated and easily replaced from the larger labor pool. It's the local justice department that keeps the employers "honest".
A Value Added Tax is a kind of sales tax. There are other ways to charge sales tax, but a VAT is OK, when the different kinds of transactions aren't just a way to game the system.
The ECU didn't have a market value. The currencies used to compute the synthetic value of the ECU had market values. But unifying the currency and trading it in an actual market as the euro changed those values, as demonstrated by its rapid plunge against the dollar to $0.82.
The natural value of a real currency was about $0.82, The synthetic value of a synthetic currency was $1.18. Decision by a committee of economists, bankers and politicians is a synthetic valuation, as proven by the test of reality in the market.
You've just added some more of the costs that don't apply. But no one has refuted the costs the city has in protecting telecommuters' ability to get paid for their work.
Nor said how to pay for it without taxing telecommuters. Some have said the NYC employer should pay, but they already don't, and the bills we're discussing don't do anything about that.
So as many times as "what costs?" gets asked in this thread, the answer is still the same. Why can't people even read the first sentence of the first post, repeated several times in the thread, when trying to argue with it?
No, the quality of legal and justice services is much better in NYC than in Jersey City. NYC has better value for money spent, due to our economies of scale and the better people we attract to manage it, but we spend more producing much more and better services. Which is one reason why people want to telecommute here: those investments in making this a better place to do business pay off in more money to spend on labor, including telecommuters.
No matter how you spin it, there's no way to say that Jersey City's services are equal to NYC's. Their quality is much lower, and our cost is higher. Someone's got to pay it. The corporations won't, the residents shouldn't pay extra for telecommuters. It's simple: telecommuters should pay for services they consume.
Anonymous clueless Coward, I'm a rich guy who knows how taxes and finance work. And the English language. So here's another hint: I've never defended double taxation, and even repudiated the implication in several of the posts.
Get a clue, then try posting even once.
I agree that telecommuters shouldn't pay the full tax in both their physical and their virtual location.
But the total tax bill should depend on what their jurisdictions spend on them. That might not mean the telecommuter bill is the same as the local worker.
I kicked off this whole annoying thread by asking "How should NYC pay for the costs of legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers while they're telecommunting to NYC businesses?
The real conspicuous absence in the thread is any way to pay for them, or even any recognition that they exist - even while quoting my mention of one example.
Guess again. Not only does NYC spend a lot of money defending itself from "cybercrime", but its defense protects lots more than just our own companies, residents and tele/commuters. As usual, we're working hard to keep the whole country working.
I said "legislating, policing, and judging the protections of the workers ". When the telecommuter's NYC employer doesn't send the pay, NYC's services protect the telecommuter. There are lots of other services like that.
Of course, there are lots of services telecommuters don't consume. They shouldn't have to pay the same taxes, and I never said they did. In fact, telecommuting offers lots of efficiencies in service consumption that should make their overall cost nationwide much lower.
But not zero. That's why I asked how those services are to be paid. No one has yet responded to that simple question. Nor has anyone but you recognized that corporate undertaxation is a problem, even though solving it is much harder (ie, not bloody likely) to solve than fixing the telecommuter tax.
As I keep repeating in this thread, corporations don't pay taxes sufficient to cover their costs.
Delaware and Maryland don't charge tolls on those roads, because their budget model doesn't require it due to alternatives. But NJ does charge tolls on its roads.
The income tax is a terrible way to tax people. I prefer a sales tax, which is simpler, easier to control, and based on the benefit people derive from the system whose bills we're paying.
Corporations don't pay their fair share, and won't be giving up the welfare their power grabs them anytime soon. We're talking about a new law that would also hand free services to telecommuters, too. And that's unacceptable, because it's economically impossible.
How about someone actually answers my question in this thread, rather than the dozens of misdirections I've charitably warded off? You've come closest, so I'll requery you.
How should those services telecommuters consume be paid?
Yeah, get corporations to give up their welfare. No chance. There is a chance to keep telecommuters paying for service demands they generate, by stopping or fixing the bills we're discussing.
As I've posted again and again in this thread, I'm not saying telecommuters have to pay the same amount of taxes as local workers - just not zero.
If you want to talk about NY getting a free lunch, I suggest you look at how much we pay to subsidize the rest of the country, especially places that offer less services. Which welfare state do you live in?
"If the company is "underpaying" taxes, as defined by "paying less in taxes than they consume in services," then the government of New York should man up and go ahead and raise taxes & revoke the tax breaks it's given to companies."
Corporations also evade taxes, but mostly they do it legally. Transforming our political system is even less likely than fixing our tax system. Until we replace either or both, like with the sales tax system I favor, we have to patch it. Patching it merely to drop telecommuters from paying for services they continue to consume, like the protections of their paychecks from deadbeat employers, just kills the protector.
Every reply post disagreeing with my post has ignored the actual reality of taxes, service cost and politics. It's like people think our society is some kind of ideal libertarian machine that just has a little bit of inefficient sand in its gears, that cleared away will just return fairness to humans. Maybe more people need to actually work physically in New York City, where reality is unavoidable.
Look, I'm talking about the obvious case where raising prices violates the law, as I mentioned necessitating legal/justice service. Like raising them despite contractual obligation, or beyond monopoly tariffs. I think you're projecting your lawyer fixation on me, and I'm not going to bother grinding out posts to meet your parsing requirements.
Yes you did. And now you're ignoring another fact I mentioned, that corporations don't pay enough taxes for their required services already - where they consume more than just the electricity for their remote access machine.
You've burned two chances to say something serious. Why should I continue to reply?
An Arizonan working for an NYC company makes that company bigger, requiring more legal infrastructure in NYC. Corporations don't pay enough taxes for governments to service them already, and raising those taxes would be harder than even taxing telecommuters. Unfortunately, many of the corporate tax breaks are produced by unaccountable politicians, like Giuliani after he was no longer eligible for reelection.
Distributed consumers of telecommuter labor make the tax/service problem more complex, naturally - just like they make everything more complex with their increased complexity. But corporations are incorporated in a single state, with offices in a single location. Telecommuter taxes are far from the first attempt to exploit corporate virtuality to evade taxes or other liabilities. Taxing telecommuters is just another example.
FWIW, I never said telecommuters would pay the full income tax, or the same taxes, as local workers. Taxing telecommuters appropriately doesn't mean picking either full or no taxes. Appropriately taxed to their service costs, telecommuters offer many benefits to their remote locations. Including flexibility in face of disasters and regional economics, as well as offering a much larger pool of labor in which telecommuters compete for work. As well as road/bridge/tunnel/transit maintenance and capacity, which are usually net losses.
FWIW, I'm continuing the debate regardless of whether you learn anything from it. I'm taking your side seriously, to ensure that my vision accommodates both the economic realities and popular (if even weak) criticisms and concerns. You're the one who's suggested the debate isn't serious in every one of your posts, which certainly doesn't encourage any hope that you wwill learn anything from it.
You're kidding about the equality of NYC government services to Jersey City government services, right? After all, your last sentence exactly supports the reasons for charging the Hoboken telecommuter taxes, just like the 5th Ave telecommuter. Except the part where the interstate commerce and telecom protection costs more in crossing the river.
Just for starters, Jersey City is mostly ghetto, NYC is only slightly ghetto. Jersey City public transit is subsidized more by NY than by NJ. The list is endless. And though Spitzer is doing a good job, he certainly didn't suddenly lift NY service delivery above that of Jersey City, which has been the pits for at least half a century, and never compared to NYC.
I didn't say you should pay the same taxes to NYC as if you physically commuted. And I didn't say that your company's distributed offices made taxing it to pay the cost of servicing it easy. But there is of course an appropriate solution. Not necessarily analyzable or presentable in a couple of Slashdot posts by me, but there's nothing paradoxical about the situation - except when one consumes services when telecommuting without paying for them.
I've posted elsewhere about the superiority of a sales tax system. It also addresses your concerns. Sales tax you paid on your rent or purchase of your home would pay for local services, as well as sales tax on local purchases you consume. Sales tax you collected on your labor would be split between your physical location (home) and where the work was consumed. Your example calls for a complex split on the consumption side, but that's a cost of complexity like other costs incurred by the complex organization. Not paying for services that enable you to sell your work there prohibits offering them - an untenable setup that would default to NYC residents paying to subsidize your work.
Just because you can't see the services supporting the receiving end of your product, doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't get paid for. If corporations paid taxes proportionate to their cost, or benefit, maybe you and your corporation would pay only your respective taxes. But they don't, so you have to.
Just moving you out of the corporation's service area doesn't make those costs go away. But, as you point out, they can be lower. So that tax should be different. And the total costs should reduce, reducing the taxes.