Morning Metro: DeKalb Shortens Summer Break, Online Tax, and Extreme Energy Conservation in Japan
Decatur Metro | October 9, 2012- DeKalb schools to shorten summer break [AJC]
- Train quiet zone neighborhood meeting on Oct 16th [East Lake]
- New employee in Decatur Revenue Division [Decatur Tax Blog]
- Online purchases to be taxed in GA [AJC]
- Today’s the last day to register to vote [CL]
- Should the market alone determine parking supply? [Atlantic Cities]
- In Japan, some forcing themselves to use less energy by lowering circuit breaker capacity [WSJ]
Latest from Decaturish
Sales taxes on internet sales? The horror! What’s next, email use taxes to save the postal service? (An issue that drives my wife nuts.)
Like a modern day Petition of the Candlemakers.
There already is sales tax on internet sales. The buyer has a legal duty to pay that sales tax to the state. As a brick and mortar merchant, I am required to collect sales tax and turn it over to the state.
The Use Tax is one of those things I love. It is a law that 99.9% of people either ignorantly or flagrantly violate. By having it on the books, it just underlines people’s respect of the law itself.
I also love the way GA expanded its meaning to use click-through ads of a GA based business. Taking a page from the Fed’s expansion of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I’m surprised they didn’t try to include any business that competes with a GA based business selling comparable products and services.
On a serious note and my hypocrisy aside, I do think that it should all be taxed. By avoiding the tax, we are just shortchanging ourselves.
Shortchanging ourselves? I wish they’d spend more time figuring out how to reduce their need for additional revenue than trying to collect more. Protectionism, whether local or federal, helps a small group of merchants at the expense of ALL consumers.
And not just in terms of tax revenue, but in terms of community on multiple levels. While cities and towns across the state have been contending with serious disinvestment, with lots of now-more-affordable commercial space lining their streets, we’ve been providing an incentive for small entrepreneurs to forego their local markets and pursue their businesses solely in the virtual realm.
The Little Shops of the world should not be the only small businesses shouldering the burden of collecting sales tax. Equalize the requirements so bricks-n-mortar investment in one’s own community is no longer seen as a disadvantage.
I don’t see how operating in the virtual realm means foregoing the local market. Seems to me that it’s an easier way to access many markets including the local market.
I’m also curious about how we came to conflate investing in a local bricks and mortar businesses with investing in one’s own community. Those who invest in local business do so to reap a financial return on their investment. Yes, of course many such investors also contribute to worthy local causes, but the same is true of Amazon, except that its contributions are spread around hundreds (if not thousands) of the communities it serves.
Let’s also keep in mind that Amazon and other retailers have been selling on-line, tax free, for a long time now. The current movement to tax those sales is not the product of a competitive crisis that suddenly appeared, it is rather borne of state and local governments’ insatiable hunger for more revenue. This has all the earmarks of an attempt to throw a revenue “band aid” over the much deeper problem of over-spending at all levels of government. It’s not a coincidence that this tax collection is starting in California, which continues to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy.
But taxing brick-and-mortar businesses and not on-line retailers distorts the market in favor of on-line businesses.
Dave I would totally support eliminating the requirement for you to collect sales taxes. The state might tell you that it forces you to collect the tax for purposes of efficiency, but I think the real reason is to hide the aggregate burden of the tax. (The fact that no one really knows what they pay in sales taxes also explains the recurring boondoggle that is SPLOST.)
Let’s have everyone keep track of their own purchases, force them to remit sales tax quaterly by writing an actual check to the State/County/etc, and see how long people continue to tolerate a 7% levy when they spend earnings that have already been taxed at least once.
I thought it was interesting during the TSPLOST debate that they had wonks figuring out the facts and figures right down to the penny of how much time sitting in a car could cost, but never bothered to share a dollar figure estimate of what the tax would cost a household, so people could make a more informed decision. I’m sure it was just an oversight.
While I understand the PR value of changing the name “Stop the Horn” to “Safer Crossing,” I don’t think anyone’s going to be convinced that the driver here is safety. Has anyone checked to see if the URL “LoudAssHornDrivingUsNuts.org” is available?
RR whistles warn cars and others that trains are approaching. Maintenance on RR signals in this country has been unreliable and the subject of a lot of litigation, and cover-ups by RR companies. It seems logical to me that eliminating an important warning signal is a terrible idea.
The laws on quiet zones recognize that there is more risk caused by prohibiting train whistles. http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/safety/NewNSRT122910.pdf
Union Pacific states that it does not support quiet zones because they compromise the safety of their employees and the general public, and notes the possible tax burden it places on locales pursuing quiet zones.
http://www.uprr.com/reus/roadxing/industry/process/horn_quiet.shtml
If you’re interested in some history about RR maintenance, litigation, cover-ups, etc., you can read this Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles from 2005:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/national/deathonthetracks_index.html
If you poke around on the internet, you can find lots of examples of cases since then that say, at least to me, that nothing has changed.
I live near tracks. I knew there was a lot of horn blowing when I moved near them in the 80’s. The horns may be annoying but they keep us safe. Let’s keep them, please.
What’s interesting is that, while accidents and fatalities at car/train crossings have decreased significantly in the past 20 years, trespasser or train/person accidents and fatalities have increased by a larger proportion to the point where more trespassers are killed than drivers/passengers.
“Balanced” schedule for DCSS: See today’s AJC article. Just like CSD parents, parents there are more likely to be against it. For the sake of all the parents who work in one system but have kids in the other, I sure hope the that DCSS schedule is in balance with CSD’s.