Wisconsin Folk Need to Slap their Gov.

[Picchioni]

Link

Wisconsin's Democratic governor thinks it's not fair that tangible items get taxed while downloads, like music, ebooks, software, etc., go completely untaxed. So, he proposes to rectify the situation by having Wisconsin's 5% state sales tax apply to Internet downloads. This is kind of like that famous hoax about how the USPS wants to charge people 5 cents for e-mail messages, except it's for real. What a dumb idea.

Of course, when you look more closely at the idea, it looks even dumber:

A little-noticed provision of the Democratic governor's proposed state budget would extend the sales tax to those Internet transactions, officials said Monday. There would be no Internet sales tax police, however, because compliance would be on the honor system.

That's right: it's voluntary. In a country that can trace its origins in part to a dispute about taxes, does this man really think that people are going to voluntarily pay a tax? And what makes it even funnier is that he thinks people in Wisconsin are going to voluntarily pay. I don't know how much you know about the American Midwest, but Wisconsinites, as wonderful as they are, are some of the... uh, how to put it... most frugal people in the country. This stereotype is actually empirically verifiable by means of the Catalogue for Philanthropy's "Generosity Index." Wisconsin is the fifth up from the bottom in terms of charitable giving, falling behind four Northeastern states.

At any rate, WI is by no means the first state to look into recouping some of the tax revenue lost through online purchases. All of the other efforts to date, though, have to do with trying to tax physical goods that are bought over the Internet (see here and here, for instance). WI is the first to my knowledge to propose taxing downloads.

All I can say is Give Me a F***ing Break!!!
Oh and sucks to be you neb

[neb1211]

It isn't just wisconsin that is trying to make laws about this.  Almost every state in the US is considering online sales tax.  Also Wisconsinites aren't frugal as the article says.  Wisconsin is already #3 on the list of most heavily taxing states in the US...

[acemaverick1381]

Yeh I read about this a while ago. My father and I had a good laugh over it when I told him what the issue was in Wisconsin... He guessed the party of the proposer too.

[JsutTechy]

First off USPS shouldn't control our mail it should be run by seperate companies like UPS and Federal Express but our government is greedy and ends up controling so many things it shouldn't. This is just stepping it up to keep up with the times. I don't see why they should put a tax on it though really. The fact that it's only Wisconsin and not a national thing is even stupider.
All they need now is to make sales tax voluntary..

[Picchioni]

Well did you hear that they are thinking about creating a Federal Sales tax and doing away with Income Taxes?  They want to have something like a 20-25% sales tax on everything except food and clothing and in return you would have no income taxes taken out of your check.  But the catch is that this 20-25% is on top of what the states already tax you so you'd be looking at something like a 27-32% sales tax

[JsutTechy]

Actually I've never heard of that one. I'll assume that still wouldn't apply to online purchases because that would be the only way to avoid something like that. While outrageous on the surface it would kind of be better in a way since it could be less for some people depending on how much they make and how much they end up spending.

[neb1211]

Well did you hear that they are thinking about creating a Federal Sales tax and doing away with Income Taxes?  They want to have something like a 20-25% sales tax on everything except food and clothing and in return you would have no income taxes taken out of your check.  But the catch is that this 20-25% is on top of what the states already tax you so you'd be looking at something like a 27-32% sales tax

Wow that would really suck...