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from the no-taxation-without-something-or-other dept.
A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved a bill that would permanently extend a moratorium on broadband access and Internet-specific taxes that Congress has temporarily extended three times over the past 16 years. The House Judiciary Committee's 30-4 vote Wednesday sends the bill to the full House for a vote. The bill would also have to pass the Senate before becoming law. The bill, called the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act [PITFA], would also remove past exemptions for seven states, including Texas and Ohio, that had Internet taxes in place before the moratorium first passed in 1998.
A permanent tax moratorium on Internet-only taxes will allow the Internet to continue to drive the U.S. economy and serve "as the greatest gateway to knowledge and engine of self improvement that has ever existed," said Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican and committee chairman. The current Internet tax moratorium expires Nov. 1. "If the moratorium is not renewed, the potential tax burden on consumers will be substantial," with access tax rates that would likely exceed 10 percent, Goodlatte said.
(Score: 1) by Shimitar on Friday June 20 2014, @09:00AM
Taxes... interesting subject.
Starting from the point that taxes are a necessary evil (i will not discuss no tax in this post), is it better to tax income or to tax spending?
If income is taxed, then spending should not be taxed.
If spending is taxed, then income should not be taxed.
If both happen, then i am being taxed TWICE.
Of course, if we tax income and not spending, it's unfair toward all the different kind of incomes which are somehow tax-exempt (lawfully or unlawfully) like drug-trafficking, offshore money, "black labor market", corporate games, creative deductibles and so on.
On the other hand, if we tax only spending, then hey, i go spend my money somewhere else altogether and we have a huge problem.
This is not even considering FAIRNESS of taxes, of course... on a VAT only system it would benefit mostly rich people who can afford to save huge money and kill the less wealthy who will pay taxes on every penny of their salaries. While a income only system can be unfair... a progressive system is always unfair toward one end or the other, while non progressive is unfair by definition since 30% of a little is way much more than 30% of a lot.
Anyway, the state always ends up with too much money to funnel trough waste and will always need more and increase taxes.
So maybe, after all, NO TAX should be a better option...
Ah, wait, then we will be spending our lives fixing the stretch of road in front of our lawns, 'cause the state will not have money for it... (and everything else, of course), ah, would there be a state at all? Probably not. And i don't think this would be a good thing.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 2) by geb on Friday June 20 2014, @10:00AM
One possible solution is to tax only things that cannot be manufactured, but tax them heavily.
Examples of things that can't be manufactured might include habitable land or electromagnetic spectrum allocations.
Taxes like that could only disrupt markets in positive ways. There is no way for such a tax to disrupt supply, since the only supply is the sale of existing units by previous owners. You would in fact be increasing supply, as anybody holding onto finite resources and refusing to use them productively would be unable to pay to keep them.
You would have to have a debate over the relative value of various allocations though. For example, you could not tax ownership of a square kilometre of empty desert at the same rate as a square kilometre of inner city.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @10:27AM
>Of course, if we tax income and not spending, it's unfair toward all the different kind of incomes which are somehow tax-exempt
What? What 'fair' is supposed to mean here?