At 08:54 AM 08/26/2003 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
The standard joke about how you tell a computer salesman from a used car salesman is that the car salesman knows when he's lying. These incompetents like taxing things, but if they don't know what they technology is about, they *really* *really* shouldn't propose special taxes on it until they know how to count the objects they want to tax. A LAN isn't just hardware (which as you say the purchasers buy sales tax on), it's also the labor involved in installing it (which they've already charged income tax on, if it was explicitly paid for) and the labor involved in operating it (which also gets income tax collected on it.) And the prices of any of the hardware except the wire keeps dropping rapidly. In the last 15 years, we've gone from $2000 1-megabit 1baseT hubs to $20 100-meg hubs, and $1500 VAX and VME cards to $59 GigE cards and $5 100baseT cards. And how do you count the interface cards that are built in to most PCs these days? And does Wireless count as a LAN? And if it does, can you add a directional antenna and make it a WAN to avoid the tax? And is this only for LANs in businesses? Or also for LANs at home? Or is this really an excuse for the LAN Tax Police to go around with scanners trying to detect people who didn't register their LANs when they were buying that Cat5 cable at the grocery store, the way the BBC Police used to go hunting for Brits who hadn't paid their television taxes? (Probably not - this seems like a clear case of incompetence rather than malice - but it *is* the state where Jeb Bush is governor.)