California Passes Internet Tax Law, Amazon Halts Associates Program

Zangmonkey said:
Neither conclusion can be effectively made from the chart.
Nonetheless, the conclusion the chart's publication is intended to display seems pretty obvious to me.
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True, I won't disagree with that, however some research into the location of the statistics could easily clear up what came first.

That said, I'd like to find the wealthiest of income earners who actually paid income taxes of that percentage listed, it doesn't happen.
 
mope54 said:
They don't have to be regressive and I don't know of any state where sales tax are regressive.

Unless you consider things like alcohol and tobacco taxes regressive because the poor are disproportionally consumers of those products, perhaps gas since private transportation is close to essential, other than those things it's not though.
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It most certainly is regressive when basic necessities such as food and clothing have sales tax applied to them.
 
steal said:
It most certainly is regressive when basic necessities such as food and clothing have sales tax applied to them.
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which state taxes food?

clothes aren't a "basic necessity"
you might disagree, in which case you're welcome to go to a local second-hand, non-profit clothing store where they will provide you with a voucher so you can purchase clothes. But no, neither shopping at Target nor Nordstroms is required for life.
 
TwistedAegis said:
You're right; a big part of CA's problem is that its tax base is so volatile. It's incredibly difficult to manage a state where the tax revenue can fluctuate so much. This is in part due to Prop 13 which limited property taxes.
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Wrong again.

Property tax recipts in California, adjusted for inflation and population growth are higher than they where before Prop 13. That's because every time a property is sold the tax reverts to the new selling price, and due to housing prices increasing faster than inflation. What prop 13 did was save many people from losing thier homes due to not being able to afford the property tax.
If it wasn't for prop 13, I likely would have had to sell my house during the housing bubble, since I wouldn't have been able to afford my property tax growing to 2 or 3 times my house payment. Even with prop 13, my property tax is over 50% of my house payment.


The problem is that government spending has faster than the economy, even when adjusted for inflation and population growth.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Sorry, but I know the class warfare game inside and out, and you're just regurgitating the same lies that have kept people voting for Democrats and left-leaning Republicans for the last 40 years. I'm not going to bother trying to explain real world economics to you because I don't think you'll be willing to listen and I'll just be wasting my time.

I will say this though. If you think fiscal conservatives only care about the rich you don't know anything about conservatism and how it works. People don't get rich by being taxed more or kept on welfare or regulated to the point that the very notion of starting a small business and complying with all the BS red tape daunts them so much that they give up and don't even bother trying. People get rich when they're free to work hard and earn money, then invest that money in their own ideas or in ideas that they think are good and will make them more money. You can't do that when you're taxed heavily or when the company you work for is taxed to the point of not being able to give out pay raises or can't expand and offer promotions. What conservatives want is for the market to be allowed to work so that people have a chance to work their way up to prosperity so they can become rich if that's what they want. It doesn't mean everyone will, it just means everyone has an opportunity. Government doesn't need to do anything except get out of the way and make sure people aren't breaking the law.

*I* am a fiscal conservative, all my friends are fiscal conservatives, and NONE of us are wealthy. We simply understand reality, and the reality is that government is failing miserably at doing anything except spending the United States of America into extinction. Your wonderful Obama administration and the libs in Congress are practicing medieval medicine with other peoples' money. They're trying to cure a severed artery by bleeding the patient even more.
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+1
Excelent explaination
 
5k077 said:
I think it's time to cut California. Back to 49 states :p
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That's a pretty foolish statement. Cutting off your nose to spite your face has never been a good idea...and like it or not, California constitutes a major part of the entire US economic, agricultural, technological, and manufacturing base...
 
I wish "they" would cut "us" loose...we pay more into the federal pie than we take out of it

@nutzo
what you're saying is true for private owners but not corporations from what I've read
 
Get rid of California. Texas can pick up the slack. California would be annexed by Mexico in a few short years.
 
SilverSliver said:
Get rid of California. Texas can pick up the slack. California would be annexed by Mexico in a few short years.
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Texas cannot pick up the slack for the entire state of California. It's good to be proud of where you are from, but don't let it distort your reality. Besides, Texas is the state that never really wanted to be part of America until they needed protection from the Mexicans ;)
 
State Taxes Paid to Fed Fed Spending in State Fed taxes Paid per Capita
CA $289,627,000 $242,023,000 $8,028
TX $146,932,000 $148,683,000 $6,437

Most recent data I was able to find. Basically if CA left the US, the windfall alone that the Fed keeps would be roughly equal to all tax receipts from TN and UT (the 2 random states I picked out that most closely equaled the amount).
 
TwistedAegis said:
Amen mope, amen. Let's start a movement.
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I'm in. California is the strongest state in the US, if we had the tax money that gets wasted on the flyover states and on bullshit on the federal level our budget problems would be solved overnight.
 
nutzo said:
Wrong again.

Property tax recipts in California, adjusted for inflation and population growth are higher than they where before Prop 13. That's because every time a property is sold the tax reverts to the new selling price, and due to housing prices increasing faster than inflation. What prop 13 did was save many people from losing thier homes due to not being able to afford the property tax.
If it wasn't for prop 13, I likely would have had to sell my house during the housing bubble, since I wouldn't have been able to afford my property tax growing to 2 or 3 times my house payment. Even with prop 13, my property tax is over 50% of my house payment.


The problem is that government spending has faster than the economy, even when adjusted for inflation and population growth.
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Agreed the current system is fine, property tax should be based on what you paid for your home, not on the fluctations of the market (prone to bubbles and speculation). Especially since as people get older and retire generally their income is going to be more limited.
 
Fail said:
Most of our budget goes to 3 things, Social Security, Medicare, and Defense spending, those 3 make up the vast majority of our spending. Social Security won't be able to pay for itself sooner or later unless something changes, it won't likely be around when I retire. I just read a report on the news stating that the total cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have costed taxpayers $4 trillion.

Let's not include the government bailouts which also include the 700 billion we gave to Wall Street.
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See. If we hadn't of wasted 4 trillion dollars on worthless wars that had no logical reason behind them, we wouldn't be in this quagmire. People are upset because we want to tax the rich more? Booh hoo, those wars and the bailouts HELPED the rich and not a single working or middle class person. Remember when Cheney and his ilk said the war in Iraq was going to cost around 60-100 billion? They should be strung up as unpatriotic carpetbaggers for their neglect and outright lying to start a stupid war that has bankrupted our country and put is into hock with the Chinese. Congrats.

Rich have been taxed far more than they do know, all of the way from WW2 up until Clinton left office. And we had uninterrupted growth in all that time. The only growth we had under Bush was the defense budget and more jobs at Wal Mart. Whoopidy Doo.
 
Thanks assholes. More taxpayers money to waste.

Guess I will shop more on Ebay until you find a way to screw that up too.....which I'm sure you will:mad:
 
TwistedAegis said:
Code: 
State      Taxes Paid to Fed     Fed Spending in State    Fed taxes Paid per Capita
CA         $289,627,000            $242,023,000                 $8,028
TX          $146,932,000            $148,683,000                 $6,437
Most recent data I was able to find. Basically if CA left the US, the windfall alone that the Fed keeps would be roughly equal to all tax receipts from TN and UT (the 2 random states I picked out that most closely equaled the amount).
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You do understand what windfall means? It's a gain or advantage.

I mean you posted the data yourself, yeah if CA left the US it'd be equal to tax receipts of two states (more depending upon the states you chose)... however also look at the first column Taxes PAID to the FED, how it's more for California. Basically the fed gets 20% interest on the money it spends, and that's just from tax receipts, doesn't count any GDP gains from California, hell may not even count gas tax receipts either (not sure where you got the data so can't tell)

Translation: If California left, the Feds would LOSE money.

Now I apologize if you simply used the term windfall wrong, however if you're anti-California (and it's cool with me if you are, I don't care) at least gets some facts straight.
 
Fail said:
Most of our budget goes to 3 things, Social Security, Medicare, and Defense spending, those 3 make up the vast majority of our spending. Social Security won't be able to pay for itself sooner or later unless something changes, it won't likely be around when I retire. I just read a report on the news stating that the total cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have costed taxpayers $4 trillion.
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Granted this was 11 pages ago, but in case it wasn't mentioned.

It kind of annoys me when people talk about SS & Medicare and how broke we are as a country/deficit. See that little thing on your paycheck that says FICA? That basically pays for Social Security and Medicare, at current both of those programs are 100% funded by this deduction, aka tax however unlike your federal taxes this is not money this isn't on a 1040 form and you can't use any deductions to lower it, in fact the feds take in more money than they spend currently so there's a surplus of something like $3 trillion in SS (not sure on Medicare/Disability), at least currently.

So while yeah those 2 things make up a huge chunk of the budget, they're already paid for, the money is already collected and in the vault, it's not costing anything more of the budget. Best of all it only amounts to 7.65% of your paycheck (less if you make over 100k/yr), hell if we put 2 more similar mandatory taxes and drop most of the federal taxes all together we could have a balanced budget with surplus, and probably pay off our debt within a decade... of course that's assuming those in congress who write the budget don't see it as a windfall of money and go spend happy (which unfortunately they would)... sound crazy? It's similar to a flat tax that's some circles talk about.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Translation: If California left, the Feds would LOSE money.

Now I apologize if you simply used the term windfall wrong, however if you're anti-California (and it's cool with me if you are, I don't care) at least gets some facts straight.
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He was trying to show the Feds lose money if we "leave."
A few posts back he +1'ed my comment that we'd be fine (better, actually) if we left from a tax perspective. I don't think he's anti-Cali :D
 
IRSmurf said:
The federal government should pass a bill mandating taxes on business transactions for both online and brick and mortar businesses. 70% of the collected tax should go to the seller's state and 30% should go to federal.The burden of reporting these taxes should lie on the business and not the customer.

While I've been enjoying the hell out of not paying taxes for online purchases, I admit that it is total bullshit we're allowed to get away with that. Our states are missing out on huge amount of revenue that the vast majority of us accept as sales tax. We need to get with the times.
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Well said and I agree.

Everytime there is a thread like this it turns into a thread about just about anything but the actual issue.

If everyone here is so against paying taxes, then I invite anyone to go live in Somalia or somewhere like that. I hear it's great there.
 
Staples said:
Well said and I agree.

Everytime there is a thread like this it turns into a thread about just about anything but the actual issue.

If everyone here is so against paying taxes, then I invite anyone to go live in Somalia or somewhere like that. I hear it's great there.
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lol. You are talking about the thread being derailed but yet you are telling people unhappy with paying more taxes to move to Somalia, funny.
 
Staples said:
Well said and I agree.

Everytime there is a thread like this it turns into a thread about just about anything but the actual issue.

If everyone here is so against paying taxes, then I invite anyone to go live in Somalia or somewhere like that. I hear it's great there.
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I don't know about that. I have heard that the people in Somalia not only have to pay taxes for Amazon online purchases but also Newegg. It is really a bad situation.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Granted this was 11 pages ago, but in case it wasn't mentioned.

It kind of annoys me when people talk about SS & Medicare and how broke we are as a country/deficit. See that little thing on your paycheck that says FICA? That basically pays for Social Security and Medicare, at current both of those programs are 100% funded by this deduction, aka tax however unlike your federal taxes this is not money this isn't on a 1040 form and you can't use any deductions to lower it, in fact the feds take in more money than they spend currently so there's a surplus of something like $3 trillion in SS (not sure on Medicare/Disability), at least currently.

So while yeah those 2 things make up a huge chunk of the budget, they're already paid for, the money is already collected and in the vault, it's not costing anything more of the budget. Best of all it only amounts to 7.65% of your paycheck (less if you make over 100k/yr), hell if we put 2 more similar mandatory taxes and drop most of the federal taxes all together we could have a balanced budget with surplus, and probably pay off our debt within a decade... of course that's assuming those in congress who write the budget don't see it as a windfall of money and go spend happy (which unfortunately they would)... sound crazy? It's similar to a flat tax that's some circles talk about.
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100% wrong. There is no money in the vault. The scumbag politicians passed something in the 90's (I believe) that allowed them to "borrow" from those funds.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE2/budget.php
 
Amazon is not charging tax to CA residents today. Looks like they will be fighting the state. :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1037453835 said:
Agree it is not perfectly linear, but I challenge your notion that increased tax rates do not lead to any revenue increases. At some point you run into limiting returns, yes, but at the point we are today, I highly doubt we are anywhere near that level.
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Market responds quickly to changing policy. This is particularly true at the institutional level.
Revenue levels as a percent of GDP may fluctuate slightly in response to tax rates but not much historically. Again, see "Hauser's Law".
Growth oriented fiscal policy (the sort which can significantly affect net revenues) has little to do with raising tax rates.
In your list of "things to do in a recession" you did not include raise taxes because that is categorically a crazy thing to do in a recession.
Even if you believe that government revenues are down because our tax rates are low (which I completely reject), we are not in a recession because government revenues are low.


This is related to the inverse justification used by conservatives for years which states that by lowering taxes you actually increase revenues due to driving business growth. This has proven to be completely and totally false.
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The idea of isolating "lowering tax rates" in fiscal policy to study its affect has never, and will never happen.
For you to claim it's totally false it, in itself, bad science. The stimuli of tax rates cannot be effectively isolated from other elements of fiscal policy (as well as fluctuations in market pressures) and therefore can't be "proven false".
You know how science works; particularly in a "large theory" field like economics.
Taxes to direct spending and regulation in productive ways may yield growth for all income levels, taxes to direct spending in the inefficient and entitlements that our government seems hellbent on doing (party irrelevant) doesn't seem to.

Yes, but you have to look at the efficiency of the conversion into growth for each. Spending on projects leads to 100% infusion of those funds into the economy through national salaries, nationally purchased materials, etc. plus the completely free benefit of actually having the infrastructure that was built. With tax reductions of the same dollar value you only get the first part, and its further diminished by there not being anything to stop these funds from being spent abroad.
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By exacerbating or creating existing market inefficiencies and/or loopholes and regulating them in place.
I'll give you a completely non-scientific anecdote to illustrate my point:
Where I live there is a poor man who digs through the dumpster for scrap metal and bounty-recyclables that aren't already separated. Because he needs extra cash he is willing to climb through whatever human filth in order to get a couple bucks.... because, to him, the labor is worth the reward and, to society, the task gets completed somewhat efficiently and organically.
The city decided instead to spend huge (borrowed) money on a second set of trucks, unsustainable union jobs for uneducated workers and construction of a facility they can't afford to maintain in order to do this same task. Then, to make sure they had access to recyclables, they criminalize the poor man from doing this task.

What happens in 5 years when aluminum prices drop? The poor man would simply stop doing the dumpster dive.... but the city will still have 20 years of bonds to pay off and even longer-term debt for the labor costs.

I'm sure I don't need to even go into "cash for clunkers" and the ridiculous premise of that program.



I agree. There are problems with how the stimulus funds were spent. I am certainly not an Obama apologist in this regard. The money provided to the financial institutions was a good - mostly untested - theory that turned out to not work in producing consumer credit as had been hoped. I think it was worth trying, but it should have been done with MUCH higher both equity and interest costs to said institutions than was demanded.
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But we try to dilute a root problem of "inappropriate lending" and "over-leveraging" by subsidizing banks to do just that. This is pretty cyclical if you ask me....

The leverage should also have been used to diffuse lobbying and institute much stronger financial legislation, including among others, the following:
  • Complete reinstatement of the Glass-Stiegel Act including among other things preventing firms that invest on behalf of clients from also investing on their own behalf
  • limiting the use of short positions and reverse repo's (only allowing investors to gain on the upside of a financial instrument)
  • Preventing the further use of any derivatives of financial instruments
  • Allowing only owners of a defaulted financial instrument to collect on credit default swaps, just like regular insurance (You can't insure you'r neighbors home or car, you should be allowed to insure a security you don't own)
  • Force the industry to take on conflict of interest rules similar to those in government (no more fancy dinners / gifts/ sports tickets to sweeten the deal for (bribe) clients)
  • etc. etc.
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Agreed re: GSA but for a different reason: moral hazard results from the banks leveraging depositors FDIC-insured money for "higher-risk" purposes.

Disagreed re: shorts. Provided that the exchanges and clearing houses actually act as required and increase margin requirements in relation to volume... short positions are a tremendously important element of finance and without them all of our pensions and retirement funds would be completely different. Increase margin with volume and volatility appropriately and the threat of short positions almost vanishes.

As for insurance.... let them insure what they want however they want but don't let them use leveraged bonds and market assets to value their reserves to the same extent. The problem was highly agitated by backing insured derivatives with holdings in the assets those derivatives "derived" from. It's not unlike how the Treasury and Fed value their books with each others' bonds....


Essentially, Obama should have used this leverage to push to bring Investment banking back to the state it was in in the 70s, before they were allowed to become "creative" and introduce new ways to earn money. Back when the market actually was rational, as opposed to today, now that the theory of the rational market has been completely turned on its head.
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The market is the people.
The people are not risk averse.

We could go on all day discussing why this is the case.... I wouldn't totally disregard the existence of comprehensive govt. safety nets though.

But now I'm starting to get off track. Stimulus funds should also have been spent on more appropriate projects, not rejected pork, I agree.
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"Shovel Ready" means "written up and already rejected as crap" 9 times out of 10.

Another reason we haven't seen the stimulus be as effective as we would have liked is quite simply because there has been to little of it. To get ourselves out of a downturn of this magnitude we should have spent 3 to 5 times more in stimulus than was done. Seeing the debt burden the country had at the onset of the financial meltdown, this was - however - not a viable option.
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I disagree. We've spent a tremendous amount of money which could have gone a long way if it were used differently.
It is, of course, hard to know this one way or the other.
That being said: stimulus for job preservation is difficult because of the debt situation most Americans have gotten themselves into. People have a hard time considering the option of working for "much" less because they've already taken on debt obligations for the income they won't have. The safety nets are much more comfortable in the meantime.


You are right, Long term entitlements are a huge part of the problem. They would have been less so had social security not been pillaged for pork in the 1980s, or had we not had unfunded tax cuts under both Reagan and Bush (W) or two HUGELY expensive wars...
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...Or an expansion of entitlements and the scope of government under Clinton through the boom.
SS and other government "trust funds" are raided for pork all the time. I have a prediction for the future! The fund created and mandated by nuclear power plants for the national waste repository is sitting in some government bank. My esteemed senator, Mr. Harry Reid, is adamant that no such facility will be opened here. I can already see him salivating over that stack of cash.


Let's not forget, the budget was balanced under Clinton. Yes, it was a strong economy which helped, but Bush W had a strong economy (at least for his first several years in office) and instead of balancing the budget he focused his time on giving his wealthy buddies unfunded tax cuts, and cutting regulation in the financial sector, partially contributing to the meltdown.
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Clinton was fortunate enough to oversee a tremendous tech boom and coming out of a previous bust.
Boom > bust > boom > bust.... Good old Austria!
Please spare me the pretense that the financial systems were not deregulated under Clinton.
Both parties couldn't wait to deregulate it because they saw dollar-signs in their campaign coffers and the public was happy too because their accounts were exploding in the boom.
Furthermore, you know the "balanced budget" (which was only called such because it was based on projected income) was not the result of government spending responsibility and discipline but because the economic growth vicariously lead to surging revenues.
In response, government expanded their budget obligations to meet the surge in revenue... directly resulting in a shortfall when the boom slowed.
Again, party irrelevant.


I agree 100%. Deficits are essential tools, but there must be discipline to repay them and not run deficits during economic upswings.
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We haven't got that discipline and our budgets are rigid because they have been long-term obligations.
When times slow down, it's not easy to cut on promises made because they are all for the long-haul.
I have another anecdote for you, but it's a good reflection of government budgeting.
I used to work in a government lab. We had to spend every last dime of our budget because if we didn't then the "managers" would figure we didn't need it and we'd lose it.
As a result, we could not ever "save" for large purchases. We had to write grants and seek larger budgets. Furthermore, equipment purchases were categorized based on price. So it was very common for us to purchase $2000 computers when $500 computers would suffice because they were booked differently and reflected "better" in our budget.

I assure you that this is how most government offices operate.



Reagan had the first part of the equation right. In the economic downturn in the early 80s he lowered taxes and ran a deficit to try to stimulate the economy out of the hole. His problem? He never stopped once the economy recovered. He kept running low tax rate induced fiscal deficits throughout the boom of the 80s, leading to tons of unwarranted national debt by the late 80s and an overheated inflationary economy and a minor (by comparison to today) economic crash in the early 90s.
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Reagan was good at convincing people he was a "small government" politician... but it has much to do with circumstance and little to do with party.
Both parties are pro "larger" government.

After all the televised debates, heated arguments and class rhetoric our leaders all go to the same restaurants for dinner and have their pensions insured by the same government-backed agencies.
 
matteos said:
California is the best, doesn't matter about the taxes, I buy my stuff from Newegg anyway so I already pay them.

Peeps are jealous, so they've got to hate.
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Hater hater....Californians on the internet pull this line every single time. Are you 13 by the way? Just seems like something a 13 year old would say.

Really i have no reason to live in california, commies, hippies, crime. On top of being a police state.

But yeah, keep riding the coattails of long gone business practices acting like the california isn't on the downslide to ruin. Hopefully the fly over states will prevent the fed from bailing you retards out. California is done and everyone knows it..
 
Savi said:
glad im moving out of cali by the end of the year lol
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I'll be the first to greet you once you live the United Socialist Republik of Kalifornia and I will welcome you to the United States of America
 
Righty said:
Hater hater....Californians on the internet pull this line every single time. Are you 13 by the way? Just seems like something a 13 year old would say.

Really i have no reason to live in california, commies, hippies, crime. On top of being a police state.

But yeah, keep riding the coattails of long gone business practices acting like the california isn't on the downslide to ruin. Hopefully the fly over states will prevent the fed from bailing you retards out. California is done and everyone knows it..
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haters gonna hate
 
All this over Amazons well known habit of pulling up and leaving whenever some state tries to saddle them with the collection of sales taxes.

While I agree that the taxes are in fact owed by the citizens that shop out of state, I don't believe Amazon or any other out of state entity is responsible for collecting those taxes for CA. CA needs to figure out how to collect from it's own errant citizens within it's own borders. It does not, and should not, get to reach out of state to Seattle, WA to cure it's own tax enforcement problems. "But nobody will pay the tax, blah, blah, blah...." It's not Amazons problem so long as they don't have a brick and mortar in state imo. Then again, I also hardly consider an affiliate as a brick and mortar presence in most cases.

The in state affiliates that Amazon drops, are the businesses that suffer the most from moves like this anyway. Makes me wonder if it is really worth it. The end result appears to be a net loss in tax income. Amazon is not going to collect the taxes, and the the in state affiliates lose income, that would have been taxed, as a result of Amazon's withdrawal.
 
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