Internet Tax Approved By Louisiana House 305
Stinky Litter Box writes "WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that the Louisiana House voted 81-9 on Thursday to propose that a '15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity.' Can you say 'slippery slope?' The good news is that Gov. Jindal opposes such a tax. Full disclosure: I grew up in south Louisiana and worked for WWL-TV in the late '70s."
Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rep. Mack "Bodi" White, R-Denham Springs, said he sponsored the bill for Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, to raise money to finance a division in Caldwell's office that investigates Internet crimes, particularly online sex crimes against children.
I agree that sex crime against children are very very bad but I think that if you look at the scope and size of the problems that plague the internet and ranked them in order, you'd find many other things precede sex crimes against children. Like Internet Fraud [fbi.gov] and Identity Theft [usdoj.gov]. How much money do people lose to things like that? Hint: A lot.
I'm sick and tired of thinking of the children, let's think about everybody for a while. The lil' bastards don't even pay taxes and they're the motivation behind 50% of the legislation in this country.
Use (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank goodness legislatures have the discipline to only use funds for the reason they gave in the justification.
Make 'em pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think 15 cents is when it is misappropriated and charged to an entire state/abused/shown to not have matched the original intent at all?
answer: a whole lot of money going nowhere. See FEMA, many useless taxes in general, etc.
Really, 15 cents sounds like small amounts, but so did the original 3% or whatever for taxing gasoline. Now about 1/4 of gasoline cost is tax. How's that working out? Money well spent?
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Insightful)
"to fight online criminal activity" (Score:2, Insightful)
News flash: a 15-cents-a-month tax will not deter criminals.
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, and....? (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at all the surcharges you pay on your telephone bill. I think the federal rural phone tax lasted until something like 1999?
This is a non-story. The big story where states are going to soak people for taxes is when Congress allows them to do sales tax on every single purchase. It's coming.
(and maybe a federal one, too)
Dedicated revenue streams are gimmicks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, another scenario.
Traffic Cops - Are they funded by Car Tax? No
Homoicide Detectives - Are they funded by Death Tax? No
Why should Internet Cops be different? As far as I'm concerned, in my workplace, I had to modernise and use computers to keep in the market place.
Did my "core" business change? No
Did my fees change? No
Why do cops need to tap a new revenue source to battle online crime. It's their job to fight crime regardless of where it is, and they are funded by the state. State's coffers getting scarce? Not my problem. They already get a piece of the action when I get my wages. They get a piece of the action when i "buy" broadband/computer/electricity. What else next?
Oh sir, you want to use that electricity to power your kettle to make coffee? That'll be a 15cent tax. Why? Boiling hot coffee was used in a crime, so we need more tax to pay for the cops to investigate coffee burn crimes.
No Katrina money left? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to agree with you there, there are so many more prominent situations across the board we could defer our resources to, however, children should not be completely put off to the side, everything is parallel, so to is the p0rn on the web...if you turn away for 2 seconds you fall so far behind playing catch up, you won't be able to catch them properly for another few years after you start again....
I believe there should be an overall committee, which has 3 sub division, fraud/identity theft, child p0rn, and virus/worm/spam divisions. These would each have there own budgets decreed by higher up management, and also
correlating to their importance to one another, but sharing tactics and technologies to better make use of resources.
Also, just because we spend 1 billion dollars on child p0rn to catch those implicated, does not mean we will get more caught, it just means the chances should be greater. It all depends on how the money is spent and where, I think before giving any more money to any of these organizations, we should see where they will spend the money , sort of like a business plan, open for review by a few high class security experts, that can see the big picture....sometimes a lot of the people in these orgs, don't really know the firs thing about technology advances, even though they mean well.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to disagree. From the perspective of law enforcement, fighting Internet crime requires a lot of extra technical expertise, and that means hiring additional people with extra training. If anything, internet crime is more like what the FBI and Secret Service have traditionally investigated.
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:1, Insightful)
Fine. You can have your wish and property taxes will go up ... As soon as the people who are not paying property taxes no longer are allowed the opportunity to vote.
Signed,
Sick of apartment dwellers voting in tax and bond initiatives funded only by property taxes
Re:In Brazil we pay 40% (Score:1, Insightful)
While you are worry about US$ 0.15/mo. We in Brazil need to worry about 40%, that's what we pay in taxes for any kind of telecomunication service.
I wish I could pay US$ 0.15 in taxes.
So what, because some assholes in your country make you pay too much, we should be happy we get to pay so little? Bullshit.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I have heard it put forth in the past, that the keys to the Constitution of the US are "terrorists" and "child pr0n".
With either of those two, you can run roughshod over the Constitution.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't seem to have a lot of molested children running about where I live. It seems like a fairly rare problem and in most cases that we do hear about it is a family member or live in boy friend that does the bad deed.
Frankly I can't see society spending much money on such an issue. I am aware that we have a witch hunt for sexual offenders. There is a city near my town that has all of its convicted sex offenders living under a bridge. That is the only spot in that city where it is legal for a released sex offender to live. Insanity is not the sole property of the mentally ill.
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you left out the fact that you're going downhill to get 50 mpg with the Impala.
Re:I'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)
You got downmodded for lying about your gas mileage. This isn't /b/ and there aren't too many 14 year old kids here who will listen to bullshit about getting 53 MPG in a 20MPG car and go "oh rly?!?".
Re:I'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)
What you say is true about SS, but I would like to clarify some things. Social security has, since it's inception, taken in more money than it pays out. What the government has been doing is taking that excess money and spending it while putting a promissory note (government treasury bill) that the government will pay back with interest that amount. This is what is know as the social security trust fund. So the government technically has been investing the social security excess in US treasuries. The problem is that soon (sounds like this year [cnn.com]) the social security administration will need to start cashing in those T-Bills to pay benefits. This will cause the government to do one or more of the following:
1. raise taxes to keep all spending the same
2. Borrow more money to keep all spending the same
3. cut discretionary spending
4. cut social security spending
5. inflate the currency / print more money
Take you pick but I would be willing to rule out numbers 3 and 4 since 3 would be the responsible thing, and 4 would be a career ending decision for any politician. I have recently started to think that it may have been a better idea to just to have a pile of non interest bearing $100 bill sitting in a vault instead since then at least we wouldn't be in this position.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Insightful)
HOW did they explain the whole concept of slavery for the... 10,000 years BEFORE Darwin then?
Perhaps because much of the history of slavery has not been race based. People have been sold as slaves for debt, and slaves have often been a prize of war, those wars often being fought over political boundaries rather than racial differences.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
They shoud make it a dollar (Score:3, Insightful)
and have it go into education.
The more you educate a society, the fewer crimes that occur. Also has the nice benefit of having an area with more businesses and a larger talent pool.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
"As any fool know,"
oh, how so true.
runnin' on wet rocks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:3, Insightful)
Odds are pretty good that since you're living less efficiently in terms of living space, you are using substantially more services per person (on average) than the folks living in the apartments. Therefore, their cost per person for services ought to be less than yours. How much less, I do not know.
Just curious, do you know the property tax difference per person for the apartments compared to your own? It would be interesting to see how that cost is distributed on a per person basis.
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:1, Insightful)
Not everyone to the left of you is a Communist. I believe that society is a beneficial enough structure to support, that's only radical in the eyes of an extremist.
And not everyone who thinks the government has too much power is an anarchist, you hypocritical bonehead. All he did was take the same idiot logic from your comment above and applied it to you; if you think that his comment was stupid, congratulations! That was the point.
Re:Okay, and....? (Score:3, Insightful)
This would result in the poor and middle class shouldering a greater tax burden than they currently do, since consumption is not proportional to income.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't be surprised, in 2001 (yes, within this millennium) they branded Darwin a racist [state.la.us] with the following flawless logic
That's great!
A state that harbored the KKK and remains the national hot bed of racism to this day. ROFLMAO
National center of Cross burning == Louisana
Re:Dude, its Louisiana....are you surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/gdp_state/gsp_newsrelease.htm
My proud state represented the worst growth from 2000-2008, including LA... And we didn't have a hurricane. Oh, and t wasn't even close. 1.6% for MI, next to last was Connecticut at 3.8%.
http://www.bea.gov/regional/gdpmap/GDPMap.aspx
Somalia is not libertarian (Score:3, Insightful)
Somalia is the product of decades of outside influences attempting to set up various conflicting government, along with a massive degree of culturally-ingrained tribalism.
Somalia is a dense mass of petty tribal governments, each holding absolute power over their limited domains, each at war with all the others, and none having the slightest respect for the personal and property rights of the individuals under their rule, much less those with whom they are at war. Nothing could be further from the libertarian ideal.
To have a libertarian society it is not sufficient to merely lack a strong central government; aggression itself must not be tolerated. The libertarian objection to government is in truth an objection to aggression itself, of which government is merely the most prominent form. Somalia lacks a central government--despite various outside nations, including the U.S., further destabilizing the region by repeatedly attempting to impose one--but in its place there exist a multitude of regional governments, among other criminal organizations, bent on practicing aggression against the Somalian people. The essence of the problem is a culture which grants these tribal leaders unquestioned authority. (This is also why central government fail to take root there: the local culture has no place for them.)
Re:"slippery slope" misused (Score:3, Insightful)