Friday, November 25, 2016

Pasadena Opts to Tax for Netflix

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/netflix-tax-streaming-services-soon-coming-to-your-bill/

A Netflix tax is coming soon, as streaming services will have an additional surcharge. The idea is simple, treating the internet like a utility means certain things, especially access and cost, and taxing them is not one of those things. We can expect a serious challenge to go to court as it seems to be a clear violation of federal regulations prohibiting states from taxing the Internet.

This is a violation of the "Interstate Commerce" clause of the U.S. Constitution. Only the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce, including taxing it. Here's part of a conversation about how little sense the move makes:
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm a bit confused.
Let's say you buy your water from a water provider and it is no longer seen as a utility. You pick your provider, and how fast you want the water to get there. This is not taxed by the government.
Yet now a city government wants to tax you on baths. Everytime you take a bath, there is tax on the water used. There is no tax on taking shower, only baths.
That idea sounds completely insane. Yet how does it differ from this news story? There is so many things you can do with water/Internet, and you tax one specific thing? None of that makes sense.
Furthermore, what's stopping you from simply using a VPN or driving a city down to set up your account and saying you live in that area? Is the tax charged only when you're in the city? What if you're away for a week, do you still owe that tax even though you used it outside the jurisdiction? And why Netflix and Hulu? Am I going to have to pay tax on my YouTube Red account or twitch Prime Memberships?

The pick and choose approach to the proposed legislation makes little sense and is prone to both abuse, and the empowerment of corporations (who will be collecting this new tax and are also pushing against net neutrality).

Chicago tried the same thing last year http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbrown/2015/07/08/chicago-to-apply-9-netflix-tax/#1d75212f27a6

1 comment:

  1. A Spectator Editorial
    Joe Biden has spent his first couple of months in office enjoying what his predecessor never had: a presidential honeymoon. Americans have rewarded Biden with early approval ratings of 60 percent or higher. He may be benefiting from the inevitable diminishing of the coronavirus as cases decline and more states reopen. Or the public may simply be relieved to have a president who isn’t perpetually in the spotlight, even if he doesn’t always seem aware of the fact he is president.

    But no honeymoon can last too long, and Biden’s is coming to an end at America’s southern border, where a crisis is escalating. Eighty thousand people tried illegally to cross the border in January, double the figure of a year ago. In February, nearly 100,000 did the same. At current rates, the spring and summer may bring hundreds of thousands more. Caught off-guard, the Biden administration has scrambled to reopen ‘facilities for migrant children’. Just weeks earlier, Democrats had called such facilities American ‘concentration camps’.

    America’s border has become the first serious failure of the Biden presidency. Texas congressman Vicente Gonzalez has warned that the rate new arrivals are being admitted at will invite thousands more to make the journey north, and will be ‘catastrophic’ for his district and the country. Gonzalez isn’t a white nationalist; he is a Hispanic Democrat.


    In Tijuana, and at othe points at the boarder, migrants have been seen wearing Biden’s welcoming t-shirts and printed signs begging “Biden, Please Let Us In!” And why shouldn’t they? It is exactly that kind of sentimentalism that the Biden administration wanted.
    President Trump had by 2020 stabilized the situation with his ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. Without the promise of easy entry to America, new arrivals at the border dried up.

    Throughout 2020, Joe Biden openly campaigned to throw out everything Trump had done and start over. He didn’t just promise to halt construction on Trump’s wall and junk the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. He also promised to reverse Trump’s public charge rule, which blocked immigrants from instantly claiming public benefits. Biden promised a path to citizenship not just for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, but every illegal immigrant in the US. Throwing the Good out with the Bad he did exactly as he promised. Even though most of what he had done was not exactly a good thing.

    Most memorably of all, Biden promised that in his administration, ICE would only arrest immigrants suspected of felonies, and in his book drunk driving wasn’t a felony. Biden described his plans as ‘reform’. But to millions abroad who wish to come to America, Biden was promising something more: if they arrive at America’s doorstep, they’ll never have to leave. For purely political reasons, Biden took a manageable situation and broke it. And thanks to the nature of the modern Democratic party, he will find it difficult to fix a second time. While the American proletariat has gradually grown addicted to pain pills and antidepressants, Washington is addicted to an even more pernicious drug: sentimentality. Leaders increasingly believe there is no difference between the best policy and the most superficially feel-good one. All the difficulties of governing throughout human history, apparently, are the work of masochistic minds eager to choose an inferior and painful policy over the correct and easier one.
    President Biden will have to find the courage to resist his own party’s new ideology, or the border crisis of his first months could turn into a disastrous problem for his entire presidency.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2021 US edition.

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