“The Daly Report” with Kay Daly!
Kay’s Guest tonight is Tim Graham form the Media Research Center
And they will be discussing the Nov CBS Movie on Reagan!
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern!
Posted on 10/29/2003 12:09:12 PM PST by Monk Dimittis
One of the more enduring Internet hoaxes is the chain letter claiming that the government has an e-mail tax in the works. Well, if Congress doesn't extend the Internet tax moratorium before it expires at the end of this week, the e-mail tax could soon cease to be an urban legend.
The current moratorium known as the Internet Tax Freedom Act, prevents taxes on Internet access, double taxation of Web purchases and discriminatory taxes that treat online sales differently from offline sales.
In effect since 1998, these bans are working just as the bill's original authors, GOP Congressman Chris Cox of California and Democrat Senator Ron Wyd en of Oregon, intended: Internet use and electronic commerce are growing rapidly while the digital divide continues to close. Families making less than $25,000 a year now comprise the fastest-growing segment of the Internet population, according to the Commerce Departmen.
But all of that will be jeopardised if the tax prohibitions are allowed to expire on Friday. A bill to make the provisions permanent passed the House in September but has stalled in the Senate, where GOP sponsor George Allen of Virginia is being thwarted by a few Republicans who have decided to dress up as tax-and-spend Democrats for Halloween.
Under pressure from the National Governors Association and others who see a digital cash cow in cyberspace, George Voinovich of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have bucked their President and party leaders by joining Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington and Kent Conrad of North Dakota in holding up the bill. If these renegades are successful and the ban lapses, watch for the tax man to pounce.
"You will double-up the price of plain old Internet access faster than a dog can jump on a meat wagon," predicted Senator Wyden last week. But that's just the beginning. With no law to stop them, state and local officials can start taxing everything from spam filters to instant messages to Google searches. E-mail taxes alone would be a gold mine for free-spending politicians across the country. At a Senate hearing on spam in May, Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton suggested "looking at some very, very small charge for every e-mail sent."
He's not alone. States and cities love the idea, and not just because of the potential for taxing, say, cross-country e-mails. Governors, mayors and county officials are thinking locally, too. A message sent by you to your neighbor per next Saturday's barbecue might easily pass through computer servers located in several of the nation's 7600 different taxing jurisdictions.
"We have heard testimony repeatedly in Congress by representatives of states who wish to use that as a basis for taxation", says Congressman Cox. "The Internet by its architecture is innately susceptible to this type of multiple taxation. And it's because of the tyranny of multiple taxation that we enacted this ban in the first place."
Many states still in denial about their spending problems have continued to claim that they are revenue starved. Senator Voinovich, a former Ohio Governor, is being urged by his successor Bob Taft to oppose the moratorium on these grounds. This is the same Governor Taft who just raised the sales tax by 20% in Ohio, a state that has seen spending rise 70% over the past 10 years.
Mr. Alexander, another former Governor and one of the strongest proponents of Web levies, has been showing up at negotiations accompanied by lobbyists for state and local tax collectors. Their claim is that Internet taxation is a state issue. We're all for federalism, but if an e-mail transaction sent from Nashville to Phoenix via servers in Dallas and St. Louis isn't interstate commerce, then what is?
Making the tax moratorim permanent also gives the law a chance to catch up with new technologies. Five years ago wireless and digital subscriber lines (DSL) weren't viable options for accessing the Internet and hence were exempted from the original Internet Tax Freedom Act. Today, both are industry standards and growing as ways of logging on. They should be included in any permanent moratorium. Taxing cable Internet access differently than DSL access distorts competition and could ultimately reduce consumer choice.
If a handful of Senators think lots of new taxes on the Internet would be good for the medium and consumers alike, we'd like to see them explain themselves. But that would mean an honest vote not the current procedural games that would let the moratorium expire and the taxmen cometh without a fight.
Mailed a letter recently?
That has the makings of a great tag line.
You may be right. However I have utmost faith in the resourcefullness of a revenue-hungry bureaucrat to find a way to tax anything they want to...
I will think about thinking about "a very very small charge..." when this a*****e names ONE tiny tiny tax that didn't become both permanent, and in some cases several hundred times their initial amount.
Temporary taxes never remain temporary. Small taxes certainly never remain small!
Nope ... I'll build my own mail server and vaporize it when the tax guys get here.
Of course there is always ICQ as well
Somewhere along the line you are connected to the internet. Someone provides you with that connectivity, right? Think of it like how you pay for electricity (ignoring any ability of you or I being able to generate electricity on our own for arguement's sake). I agree that it would open up a whole can of worms where some entity would be present spliced into somewhere along the Internet backbone but when the payout has such a huge potential, you KNOW there are going to be many crafty solutions proposed. If the flag drops, we're all in the spotlight....they'll sell it as a means to quash spam too.....just watch.
For all practical purposes, it will be people such as yourself running a configuration that will be deemed "tax avoidance" and you will be one of those cases that they will focus on to create the "solution"
I'm sickened by the possibility that all of this is going to happen. I depend on Internet and e-mail access from many locations to do my job. Part of me actually wants to see what chaos ensues if the moratorium is allowed to sunset. This has the potential for causing such massive upheaval that anyone who let it happen or jumps on the taxation bandwagon as soon as the prohibition lapses will be instantly exposed and action taken against them for arresting the economy and whatever worse things that could happen. Political careers are the smallest thing in all of this to be ruined but I hope that they are the first thing to be roasted on a spit....and the backlash will make the tax moratorium permanent (I can dream, can't I?)
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern!
I had some time to think about just how much information and what TYPES of information uses the Internet as a pathway in just my situation and it is pretty wide-ranging roster. In business, I use a few dozen applications that reside on servers in other locales....the Internet serves as the conduit for the requests and the applications/services are accessed via web pages. Anyone who uses Google or any other search engine is doing something similar when you take it down to its bare essentials. My e-mails are as much a method of file transfer as they are simple text-based communication. Sure, for hefty stuff, there is FTP but yes, the government would somehow be examining every packet of information that flows to and fro to determine if it is a web page request, an e-mail an upload/downlod via FTP, streaming content, and any other type of signal.....wholly unreasonable to implement and one would suspect unconstitutional....BUT given that the potential payout is so great-and those proposing such things probably have no idea how invasive and disruptive just their data gathering/monitoring would have to be to do all this-you know that if given the chance, SOMEBODY is going to want to do this and some way will be found to wiggle around things like the Constitution.
Being taxes on connectivity is one thing....I'm paying like you are but on a lesser scale....where it may go (as I've heard discussed) is a taxation scheme based upon usage - how much data and what kind of data flows in and out...
I agree that the eventuality of all of this if it comes to pass is a mass exodus of IT operations and server farms offshore to some territory that would be outside the US.
Just playing Devil's advocate amongst ourselves, we can see the nightmarish implications of where some ill-informed and agenda/special interest conflicted politicos would have us all go. We just have to do what we can to avert the disaster. If it starts, it needs to be made into an unworkable mess so it gets scuttled as quick as possible.
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