Audits could be automated thus: when you get your business license, you must also get your software tax-audit app, which you then install on all your machines and network servers; it queries each system and reports what's installed to the state. (Such software already exists as a network management tool; the only diff being that the Tax Audit model would report to the state rather than to the sysadmin.) You are then taxed bases on the MSRP for each software package that is present, much as cars are taxed per their book value, rather than what you actually paid. Failing to install the Tax Audit software would incur major fines, and repeat offenders would lose their business license.
Of course this raises all sorts of security and compatibility questions, not to mention potentially large discrepancies in MSRP vs street price, but since when does the state give a hoot about whether taxes is fair or convenient to the taxpayer?
As to free software, if it's available commercially at all, that's the price you'd get taxed at. So if you downloaded some linux package for free, but it's ALSO being sold at Best Buy for $50, you're taxed as if you'd paid $50 for it. See? No more preferential treatment. (Same could be done with shareware -- tax at the nominal registration price for a single copy, whether registered or not.)
As to double taxation, that's old news, since you also pay property tax on your other assets that you already paid sales tax on.
If gov'ts had to live within their means (like the rest of us do!) they wouldn't feel such a need to squeeze every possible penny out of us... but that's another rant.
Acto TFA, it's not an IF; they already tax software as a business asset, they're just making it state law rather than local law. And I doubt this is aimed at small businesses, but rather at enterprise where the price of software in use runs to multiple millions, perhaps even billions of dollars.
Your comment made me wonder about another opensource issue, tho -- what about cases where the software itself is free, but you buy a support contract? Are you taxed to the value of the software, or to the value of the associated support contract (without which the software may be worthless)??
Acto TFA, parts of Tennessee are already taxing software:
Currently, there is no consistent approach to determining what business software should be considered taxable, according to the executive
secretary of the State Board of Equalization, which proposed the change. However, software already is taxed as property in some Tennessee counties, said Kelsie Jones. He said county assessors have taken "varying approaches" in
making distinctions about not only taxing software, but the kinds, as well. For example, Mr. Jones said, some tax operational software but not that which is applicational. The new rule would provide a uniform standard across the state, he said.
I agree, this hasn't been thought out beyond just being another form of personal/business property tax sticking it to anything that looks like it might have value. And since software licenses often state that ownership remains with the publisher, WHO do you tax?? -- and in the case of aftermarket customization, does the publisher pay part and the business the rest? And for how many copies -- do you tax it by the number of boxed copies, or by the per-seat license, or by the per-CPU license?
[laughing] Oh yes, couldn't have said it better. Global warming is the new religion! If you sin against nature, the great god Climate will get pissed and strike you down.
The historical records only go back a couple hundred years in any meaningful way (and take a look at maps from pre-1920... before aerial photography, maps had at best wild guesses about terrain that hadn't been mapped by someone on foot).
The big difference is that deforestation due to wildfires (caused by nature or man) rather quickly grows back; in fact, wildfires are a natural part of the reforestation cycle.
Whereas deforestation in favour of farming stays deforested until the farm is taken out of service and let go back to wilderness -- and that happens almost never.
Actually, whilst RTFAing, I was inspired to wonder if this study had logging interests behind it.
The problem with localized landscaping is that it fails to take microclimates into account. Frex, Santa Clarita (the next valley north of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley) is actually the terminus of a river valley that reaches all the way to the Pacific Ocean without significant interruption. Used to be at 2.30 every afternoon the ocean wind arrived and cooled the SCV down, making summer afternoons pleasant (rather than scorching hot in the usual manner of the high desert). And so it was until galloping development completely filled the midvalley, bringing with it a solid swath of new landscaping. The increased humidity from said landscaping was enough to create a permanent pocket of heavy air that blocks the afternoon ocean wind -- so now the SCV stays hot until after dark. This happened in the space of only a couple years, immediately following the first big growth spurt.
But speaking from 21 years' observation, this doesn't seem to have affected any of the surrounding area in any significant way.
The story also fails to note that huge swaths of temperate Europe and North America *used* to be forested, which are now cleared and in use as farmland.
Tho I feel compelled to point out that both the somewhat warmer climate of the early middle ages, and the "Little Ice Age" that followed (and helped bring on the "Dark Ages") happened before most of these primeval forests were cut.
How many more contradictions can the theory of locally-controlled global warming support, before the sun gets disgusted with the whole idea and fries all of us to a crisp?
I've already seen annoying ads and banners from Google ad feeds, some bad enough to make me consider blocking them. And while what sort of ads are accepted may be up the the site owner, in the previous discussion someone pointed out that graphical ads pay better, so there is incentive for site owners to encourage them.
And that indeed does make me much less likely to visit such a site (having learned that the value of the average site is inversely proportional to the annoyance factor of the ads it displays).
I was indeed thinking of the quarterly payments which are the very least that's required of the masses, one way or another. But as banks know (hence take a couple days to release deposited funds) there's interest to be made on money which they don't have to wait even a single day to get their grubby hands on (allowing equivalent processing delay for either payroll or sales tax, they still gain a day or two in which to earn interest). If even a little more of our money goes directly into the tax coffers, that's a lot of gain for them, and probably well in excess of what they get from having custody of our money all year (even what will be eventually refunded). I'm sure someone has run the numbers....
And I'm afraid my attitude toward the April circus is "why the hell didn't they just let me keep it in the first place?! Fuckers steal my money all year and don't even pay me interest on it." (I'd resent it less if I didn't see so much evidence of gross waste everywhere I look.)
I did find it fascinating that even the most conservative estimates (as contrasted to wildassed guessing by the FairTax proponents) found that to match and wholly replace the income tax, a national sales tax must be around 56%!! Think what damage THAT would do to your purchasing power, and in turn to the economy. Since it would apply to ALL purchases including real estate, home ownership would instantly become the sole province of the rich (even if worked into the loan, it still jerks the monthly payments out of average folks' reach). In turn that affects rentals and po'folks in ways they won't directly see.
Methinks the net results would be recession (with nearly all markets that depend on disposable income being depressed out of business) and galloping inflation.
If you purchase stuff from a distant merchant and thereby avoid paying sales tax (since you are not in the merchant's home state), your money still goes to the merchant's home state in the form of income taxes paid by that merchant. The more stuff he can sell, the more income tax the merchant pays. I suspect this more than makes up for any lost sales tax.
Internet sales tax may well result in a net loss of taxes for some states, once the total cost of merchandise is no longer attractive to remote customers and the local merchants are making less money on which to be taxed (not to mention letting employees go, who are now no longer paying income tax and are buying less so pay less sales tax too).
Maybe Canada has a surplus at the moment, but per every figure I could find, Canada also has about $600 billion in debt, and is paying about $42B/year just in interest on that debt.
That's easy to deal with. They just stop everything at the border (and possibly open it for inspection), use either its declared value or a wild-assed guess, and charge you an import duty for it based on its presumed value.
Individuals sending stuff to one other can get away with marking the package "gift" and not have to pay duty, but that wouldn't fly for a business.
And I think you're right, states that don't think they're getting enough of the tax gravy train are likely the big whiners here.
"If I buy big ticket items, it would probably be best to tranship them to a tax free entity (Canada? NH?), deliver them there, then continue shipping to the original destination."
If you do that with a car, California will tax you anyway when you try to license the vehicle -- IIRC it's based on how long you've owned it prior to importing it into CA (which is easy enough to check). If it's a recent out-of-state purchase, it gets taxed in CA, regardless of where you bought it.
[goes off, reads FairTax FAQ] The whole FAQ seems to revolve around explaining why a massive increase in prices (since businesses pass on all their tax costs to customers) and in up-front taxes (since the money is taken away from you on the spot, rather than having a chance to use or invest it for a while before having to pay up) is somehow a good thing, because ultimately the prices on everything will "go down", so everyone eventually pays less sales tax (let's call it what it is).
This sorta fails to notice that the gov't spends the same total amount of money regardless, and if it needs $2.00 but only collects $1.00, it will find some way to double taxes. (Witness how high sales taxes have climbed in some areas, and that high sales tax tends to go hand in hand with high prices for everything.)
And nothing would make the gov't happier than being paid up front, rather than having to wait several months for income tax installments (per the current system).
[laughing] Alas, no, the trusty 486 was murdered by an evil keyboard back in 1998... but I am still using a lowly P3-550. Now, if everyone here donates $50 toward replacing it, think of the shiny new state of the art machine I could have to run NS3 on:)
One really nice thing about using an old browser: I see more of the content and less of the presentation. Sure makes the web easier on the eyes!
I still use NS3 every day, and I don't load images because I'm on very slow dialup, and I've come to prefer the web that way:)
Anyway, what you say isn't true of NS3 at all (nor of NS2 for that matter). If image dimension isn't specified, NS3 just shows a small placeholder, instead of a placeholder of the correct size. Even on a slow machine (and I used NS3 on a 486 for years, so I know!) it makes no *practical* difference in rendering time, and does not affect the rest of the page (I think you're remembering what happens when a table structure isn't closed) nor does it cause a reflow.
But specifying image size DOES matter, for three common cases:
1) So you can read the image's ALT text. This is not possible if the image is unsized and therefore shows as the small placeholder.
2) when images are used as menu graphics -- assuming the webmaster included proper ALT text. Here again, if the images are "sized", you can read the ALT text and the menu is still usable without loading its graphics.
3) imagemaps. Properly "sized" imagemaps are generally still usable without loading the image, since you still have the same clickable areas represented on the screen.
(I don't know how any of this affects screen scrapers for the blind.)
The people don't supply the congressional seats; we-the-people *pay* for them (we might even be considered 'consumers' of congresscritters). The seats are provided by the government itself, and limited by the established gov't. We-the-people have no power to increase the supply.
So... if gov't is the store, and congress is the product, votes are dollars... what happens if we *stop* "spending" these "dollars" entirely??
Unfortunately... while 50 million people shooting up an oppressive gov't is a "revolution", one out of 250 million doing so is a "terrorist" and as the occasional high-level assassination has demonstrated, is far more likely to result in increased oppression rather than the reverse.
I wonder if anyone has ever charted out the incidence of revolution, vs. the average person's income and value of possessions? I suspect the relationship is fairly close, and that once a threshold of fewer than 50% at the poverty line is passed, revolution simply does not occur, as there is no longer a sufficient mass of seriously dissatisfied or disenfranchised people.
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Audits could be automated thus: when you get your business license, you must also get your software tax-audit app, which you then install on all your machines and network servers; it queries each system and reports what's installed to the state. (Such software already exists as a network management tool; the only diff being that the Tax Audit model would report to the state rather than to the sysadmin.) You are then taxed bases on the MSRP for each software package that is present, much as cars are taxed per their book value, rather than what you actually paid. Failing to install the Tax Audit software would incur major fines, and repeat offenders would lose their business license.
Of course this raises all sorts of security and compatibility questions, not to mention potentially large discrepancies in MSRP vs street price, but since when does the state give a hoot about whether taxes is fair or convenient to the taxpayer?
As to free software, if it's available commercially at all, that's the price you'd get taxed at. So if you downloaded some linux package for free, but it's ALSO being sold at Best Buy for $50, you're taxed as if you'd paid $50 for it. See? No more preferential treatment. (Same could be done with shareware -- tax at the nominal registration price for a single copy, whether registered or not.)
As to double taxation, that's old news, since you also pay property tax on your other assets that you already paid sales tax on.
If gov'ts had to live within their means (like the rest of us do!) they wouldn't feel such a need to squeeze every possible penny out of us... but that's another rant.
Acto TFA, it's not an IF; they already tax software as a business asset, they're just making it state law rather than local law. And I doubt this is aimed at small businesses, but rather at enterprise where the price of software in use runs to multiple millions, perhaps even billions of dollars.
Your comment made me wonder about another opensource issue, tho -- what about cases where the software itself is free, but you buy a support contract? Are you taxed to the value of the software, or to the value of the associated support contract (without which the software may be worthless)??
Currently, there is no consistent approach to determining what business software should be considered taxable, according to the executive secretary of the State Board of Equalization, which proposed the change. However, software already is taxed as property in some Tennessee counties, said Kelsie Jones. He said county assessors have taken "varying approaches" in making distinctions about not only taxing software, but the kinds, as well. For example, Mr. Jones said, some tax operational software but not that which is applicational. The new rule would provide a uniform standard across the state, he said.
I agree, this hasn't been thought out beyond just being another form of personal/business property tax sticking it to anything that looks like it might have value. And since software licenses often state that ownership remains with the publisher, WHO do you tax?? -- and in the case of aftermarket customization, does the publisher pay part and the business the rest? And for how many copies -- do you tax it by the number of boxed copies, or by the per-seat license, or by the per-CPU license?
[laughing] Oh yes, couldn't have said it better. Global warming is the new religion! If you sin against nature, the great god Climate will get pissed and strike you down.
The historical records only go back a couple hundred years in any meaningful way (and take a look at maps from pre-1920... before aerial photography, maps had at best wild guesses about terrain that hadn't been mapped by someone on foot).
The big difference is that deforestation due to wildfires (caused by nature or man) rather quickly grows back; in fact, wildfires are a natural part of the reforestation cycle.
Whereas deforestation in favour of farming stays deforested until the farm is taken out of service and let go back to wilderness -- and that happens almost never.
Actually, whilst RTFAing, I was inspired to wonder if this study had logging interests behind it.
The problem with localized landscaping is that it fails to take microclimates into account. Frex, Santa Clarita (the next valley north of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley) is actually the terminus of a river valley that reaches all the way to the Pacific Ocean without significant interruption. Used to be at 2.30 every afternoon the ocean wind arrived and cooled the SCV down, making summer afternoons pleasant (rather than scorching hot in the usual manner of the high desert). And so it was until galloping development completely filled the midvalley, bringing with it a solid swath of new landscaping. The increased humidity from said landscaping was enough to create a permanent pocket of heavy air that blocks the afternoon ocean wind -- so now the SCV stays hot until after dark. This happened in the space of only a couple years, immediately following the first big growth spurt.
But speaking from 21 years' observation, this doesn't seem to have affected any of the surrounding area in any significant way.
I'm wondering if instead of stopping flowing, the Gulf Stream might flow more to the north and less to the east?
The story also fails to note that huge swaths of temperate Europe and North America *used* to be forested, which are now cleared and in use as farmland.
Tho I feel compelled to point out that both the somewhat warmer climate of the early middle ages, and the "Little Ice Age" that followed (and helped bring on the "Dark Ages") happened before most of these primeval forests were cut.
How many more contradictions can the theory of locally-controlled global warming support, before the sun gets disgusted with the whole idea and fries all of us to a crisp?
I'm thinking this probably applies to the AOL Keyword content, rather than to AOLer-created web content.
I've already seen annoying ads and banners from Google ad feeds, some bad enough to make me consider blocking them. And while what sort of ads are accepted may be up the the site owner, in the previous discussion someone pointed out that graphical ads pay better, so there is incentive for site owners to encourage them.
And that indeed does make me much less likely to visit such a site (having learned that the value of the average site is inversely proportional to the annoyance factor of the ads it displays).
I was indeed thinking of the quarterly payments which are the very least that's required of the masses, one way or another. But as banks know (hence take a couple days to release deposited funds) there's interest to be made on money which they don't have to wait even a single day to get their grubby hands on (allowing equivalent processing delay for either payroll or sales tax, they still gain a day or two in which to earn interest). If even a little more of our money goes directly into the tax coffers, that's a lot of gain for them, and probably well in excess of what they get from having custody of our money all year (even what will be eventually refunded). I'm sure someone has run the numbers....
:)
And I'm afraid my attitude toward the April circus is "why the hell didn't they just let me keep it in the first place?! Fuckers steal my money all year and don't even pay me interest on it." (I'd resent it less if I didn't see so much evidence of gross waste everywhere I look.)
I did find it fascinating that even the most conservative estimates (as contrasted to wildassed guessing by the FairTax proponents) found that to match and wholly replace the income tax, a national sales tax must be around 56%!! Think what damage THAT would do to your purchasing power, and in turn to the economy. Since it would apply to ALL purchases including real estate, home ownership would instantly become the sole province of the rich (even if worked into the loan, it still jerks the monthly payments out of average folks' reach). In turn that affects rentals and po'folks in ways they won't directly see.
Methinks the net results would be recession (with nearly all markets that depend on disposable income being depressed out of business) and galloping inflation.
BTW I love your handle
If you purchase stuff from a distant merchant and thereby avoid paying sales tax (since you are not in the merchant's home state), your money still goes to the merchant's home state in the form of income taxes paid by that merchant. The more stuff he can sell, the more income tax the merchant pays. I suspect this more than makes up for any lost sales tax.
Internet sales tax may well result in a net loss of taxes for some states, once the total cost of merchandise is no longer attractive to remote customers and the local merchants are making less money on which to be taxed (not to mention letting employees go, who are now no longer paying income tax and are buying less so pay less sales tax too).
Maybe Canada has a surplus at the moment, but per every figure I could find, Canada also has about $600 billion in debt, and is paying about $42B/year just in interest on that debt.
That's easy to deal with. They just stop everything at the border (and possibly open it for inspection), use either its declared value or a wild-assed guess, and charge you an import duty for it based on its presumed value.
Individuals sending stuff to one other can get away with marking the package "gift" and not have to pay duty, but that wouldn't fly for a business.
And I think you're right, states that don't think they're getting enough of the tax gravy train are likely the big whiners here.
"If I buy big ticket items, it would probably be best to tranship them to a tax free entity (Canada? NH?), deliver them there, then continue shipping to the original destination."
If you do that with a car, California will tax you anyway when you try to license the vehicle -- IIRC it's based on how long you've owned it prior to importing it into CA (which is easy enough to check). If it's a recent out-of-state purchase, it gets taxed in CA, regardless of where you bought it.
[goes off, reads FairTax FAQ] The whole FAQ seems to revolve around explaining why a massive increase in prices (since businesses pass on all their tax costs to customers) and in up-front taxes (since the money is taken away from you on the spot, rather than having a chance to use or invest it for a while before having to pay up) is somehow a good thing, because ultimately the prices on everything will "go down", so everyone eventually pays less sales tax (let's call it what it is).
This sorta fails to notice that the gov't spends the same total amount of money regardless, and if it needs $2.00 but only collects $1.00, it will find some way to double taxes. (Witness how high sales taxes have climbed in some areas, and that high sales tax tends to go hand in hand with high prices for everything.)
And nothing would make the gov't happier than being paid up front, rather than having to wait several months for income tax installments (per the current system).
[laughing] Alas, no, the trusty 486 was murdered by an evil keyboard back in 1998... but I am still using a lowly P3-550. Now, if everyone here donates $50 toward replacing it, think of the shiny new state of the art machine I could have to run NS3 on :)
One really nice thing about using an old browser: I see more of the content and less of the presentation. Sure makes the web easier on the eyes!
So, you're saying that you've been brainwashed into ignoring all advertising? ;)
I still use NS3 every day, and I don't load images because I'm on very slow dialup, and I've come to prefer the web that way :)
Anyway, what you say isn't true of NS3 at all (nor of NS2 for that matter). If image dimension isn't specified, NS3 just shows a small placeholder, instead of a placeholder of the correct size. Even on a slow machine (and I used NS3 on a 486 for years, so I know!) it makes no *practical* difference in rendering time, and does not affect the rest of the page (I think you're remembering what happens when a table structure isn't closed) nor does it cause a reflow.
But specifying image size DOES matter, for three common cases:
1) So you can read the image's ALT text. This is not possible if the image is unsized and therefore shows as the small placeholder.
2) when images are used as menu graphics -- assuming the webmaster included proper ALT text. Here again, if the images are "sized", you can read the ALT text and the menu is still usable without loading its graphics.
3) imagemaps. Properly "sized" imagemaps are generally still usable without loading the image, since you still have the same clickable areas represented on the screen.
(I don't know how any of this affects screen scrapers for the blind.)
The people don't supply the congressional seats; we-the-people *pay* for them (we might even be considered 'consumers' of congresscritters). The seats are provided by the government itself, and limited by the established gov't. We-the-people have no power to increase the supply.
So... if gov't is the store, and congress is the product, votes are dollars... what happens if we *stop* "spending" these "dollars" entirely??
Unfortunately... while 50 million people shooting up an oppressive gov't is a "revolution", one out of 250 million doing so is a "terrorist" and as the occasional high-level assassination has demonstrated, is far more likely to result in increased oppression rather than the reverse.
I wonder if anyone has ever charted out the incidence of revolution, vs. the average person's income and value of possessions? I suspect the relationship is fairly close, and that once a threshold of fewer than 50% at the poverty line is passed, revolution simply does not occur, as there is no longer a sufficient mass of seriously dissatisfied or disenfranchised people.
And don't forget this article (math and all) about the RIAA contracts screwing the artists: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Funny you should mention Mao... I was just thinking how closely your scenario resembles China's Great Leap Backwards. :(