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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: 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.