GRAYOUT! LOL
Posted on 12/22/2002 4:48:18 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Edited on 04/12/2004 5:47:19 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
SACRAMENTO(AP) - Though it may seem like chump change compared to California's projected $35 billion budget deficit, sales taxes on online shopping could spare countless small government programs from extinction by raising $200 million yearly - and possibly much more.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Grayout doesn't understand these little factoids.
But as much as I despise taxes and as much as I love the Internet, I can't understand the clamor to punish non-web businesses with an unfair tax advantage for their web competitors.
Please flame away if you have a single economically salient point.
It's probably not cost effective driving to OR for that reason, but since I had to travel through there anyway I figured I'd just kill 2 birds...
If a vendor doesn't turn IN the sales, there is no way that the state can collect taxes.
The lawmakers are also torqued off because of cigarette sales over the internet, because people are fed up with the high taxes. The government just wants an "in" to the Net to get their fat fingers into the pie. I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon.
GRAYOUT! LOL
God forbid that any of these state governments facing budget problems ever thinks of cutting their spending.
It doesn't have anything to do with the web. The $1000 TV I buy from an out-of-state company over the Net today is the $1000 TV I bought over the phone/by fax/by snail mail ten years ago from the same out-of-state company. Simon and his cronies are just using the web as an excuse, trying to get the little people to think this is something new just because of the method used to place the order. It's not.
No flame at all! It just levels the playing field by negating the shipping charges. I think that was what it was all about at first. Now Fedex and UPS get the "taxes" rather than the states, and it works out fairly close, too.
The shopping convenience is such that driving to a local mall versus waiting three days for the goods is the toss of a coin. What are my Saturday Mornings worth? $5 an hour? $10? $200? With a few keystokes, some guy in a brown suit will bring it to me for the few dollars I saved by not having a sales tax.
Guess that means all the city and state officials that have been buying new Cadillacs can keep on spending. All all we will have to do is keep track or our sales, collect them, pay them quartly, high a tax accountant to make sure we keep everything straight and help us file our taxes, take time out for state audits, wrangle with Municipalities arguing a tax is also owned to them and not just the state...
That sums it up exactly.
Years ago, I ran a small software business. I sold one copy to Hughes Helicopter in Arizona. I received a demand in the mail for sales tax.
I told them to stuff it: "I am aware of and am following--as you surely must be--recent legal findings on cases similar to your illegal attempt to tax a citizen of California." Or something like that.
I'd guess I received six such "demands" a year--mostly from Eastern states--to which I responded identically, and they went away.
--Boris
The government takes a larger share of the economic pie than it has at any other time in history. When is enough enough?
The fact is, taxation hurts our society, our freedom, and the hope for a better life that we all wish for our children.
Here is some food for thought: If in postbellum America (circa 1870s/1880s), a program like LBJs Great Society/War on Poverty of the 1960s were enacted, with the corresponding levels of taxation to fund such programs, then the amount of money taken out of the private sector during the equivalent 40 year period as it has since the 1960s, would mean that today, our economy would be about the size of the current Mexican economy.
Yes, we need some level of taxation to fund the necessary functions of government - but the fact is, over-bloated government sucking away tax dollars, politicians who think that the money is the government's in the first place, and the high levels of taxation we are faced with today mean that we are mortgaging our future, and our children's future.
BfloGuy - are you from Buffalo, NY?
If you are, why do you think manufacturing has moved out of that once prosperous region? Do you blame NAFTA, the Chinese, greedy corporations? The fact is, high taxation in the region means that companies seeking to expand their must overcome a profitability threshold above and beyond what they face in other regions. High taxation adds insult to injury where it comes to job creation and the movement of economic activity between regions and out of the country.
You say you despise taxes. That's great, we all do - it's something that comes instinctively to Americans given our history and the founding of our country. But your hate of taxes is trumped by your "zero-sum-game" perspective on the economy. IOW, where you say non-web businesses are punished with an unfair tax advantage - you play right into the argument that one person's gain (in economic terms) comes at the loss of another. Frankly, this zero-sum-game thing is a socialist perspective of the econonomy and is how socialists sell their world economic view to a gullible public (it is the basis of class warfare and class politics favored by Democrats).
Take the web vs. non-web businesses -- many Ma and Pa shops are present on the internet (e.g., look at many businesses based on the distribution and sales of electronics, computers, and books), while many traditional brick and mortar stores have a web presence. Traditional catalog businesses stand to lose with internet sales taxes, as do local businesses that capture out-of-state web business. Isn't it enough that small businesses in a particular state must pay tax on their profit? How does it help a CA based company doing sales with people around the country if they have to charge a sales tax, on top of the tax on income they already pay?
Here's what we need:
1) Politicians to learn that they must limit their spending, especially during prosperous times. Many states are in trouble today because they expanded their activities when the stock market was in good shape in the late 1990s and they were expecting large windfalls from the recent cigarette settlement. When times aren't as good, and tax receipts fall, they want to raise taxes instead of promoting growth.
2) A simplified tax system that serves to generate funds for necessary state functions. The economy is far too complex to be tweaked by a manageable tax code. Today our tax codes are too complicated and even for those who support the idea of using the tax code to implement social change, today's tax code is too complicated, unmanageable, and too much geared to serving special interests. This current system is more of a benefit to politicians than it is to citizens (i.e., businesses (of which all employed people are a part), and consumers (which we all are because we all must eat, we must have clothes, and we all have needs, wants and desires as human beings)).
3) Finally, people in this country need to abandon the socialist form of government we have adopted. The sad fact is, we have a corporatist form of socialism prevailing over our political economy that focuses on controlling the distribution of economic production, and increasingly encroaches upon the control of the ownership of production and property itself. Sadder yet, many people don't even think or aren't capable of thinking that we do employ a socialist system here. Too many people think freedom entails the ability to run down to Walmart and participate in the latest consumer fad.
Are my points "economically salient?" Well, not exclusively, because the problems regarding taxation in this country are just as political as they are economic. It's one thing to understand and despise taxes because it means less money for yourself, but it's another to understand the affects of over-taxation on the entire society, the development of the economy, and the corruption of the political system. So, my message here is not meant to be a flame in response to your post - just a plea to look at the political manipulation of the tax code and tax policies, and a plea to understand that high taxes harm our society and its potential.
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