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by Jerry Lerman

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Do You Blog In Philadelphia? Did You Pay Your $50/year Blogger Tax?
And so it begins. A terrible precedent and an affront to your right to free speech. Blog This !


Blog this (while it's still free).

The city of Philadelphia says that if you live in Philadelphia and there is any potential whatsoever that your blog can earn you a cent, either because you post ads or ask for donations, whatever, to perhaps get back some of your Internet expenses, then you must give them $50/year or a $300 lump sum. Hobby or business, it doesn't matter. If you can't possibly get back $50 over your lifetime, it doesn't matter. Pay up. $50/year. They want money from you and they found a way to get it.  Is this $250/year from a typical family?

They say that this is a good thing because it exempts you from taxes on the profit on your blog if it collects up to $100,000. But you and I know that if you get any amount of significant money from your blog, not even approaching $100K, they'll say it isn't a blog and that it's a business and you bought the wrong business license and you owe the taxes and maybe even penalties for buying the wrong sort of business license.  It's a scam and a first step for finding new taxes to fund government that cannot control its own spending. It's too easy for them.

Will there be a State blogger tax? A Federal blogger tax? A tax on how much music you stream? How many videos you watch? The number of Tweets you send? The number of online dates you get? What else are they thinking about? If they can get away with this, they will enact more taxes.

This is a dangerous precedent because every other government is looking at how this plays out. Waiting to see how you react to this. Let the reaction begin!

This is the brainchild of Council members Bill Green at Bill.Greenlee@phila.gov and
Maria Quiñones-Sánchez at
Maria.Q.Sanchez@phila.gov.  Feel free to nicely tell them what you think. It's still tax free.

Blog this! And fight back before it's your local government! This will not be effective unless they receive plenty of email about this. Blog this!

A bit of an update:

Philadelphia is officially saying that this is not a "blog tax." That everyone is freaking over this and wrongly claiming this is a blog tax. We're all crazy and Philadelphia can't understand why anyone is making a big deal about this. Even some professional journalists have picked this up and run with it. That it's simply a business tax. If you do something that potentially earns money, you need a business license regardless of what you do. They hope that by convincing people to accept that a hobby is a business, that people will just grumble about  it as a lousy business license policy. But it's a diversion, done on purpose to defocus everyone. A lot of people like arguing semantics instead of focusing on the core issues. Philadelphia hopes they can get enough people arguing semantics to water down the argument.

Philadelphia likens a blogger  to a freelance writer who always had to pay for a business license. But a freelance writer is hoping to earn extra income by being a writer. Not hoping to maybe earn a little money to support a hobby. The backyard vegetable grower is not a farmer, even if she sells her neighbor some tomatoes.

Look at it this way. Suppose Philadelphia were to decide that any place people occupy which gives at least one overnight accommodation  per year to someone who is not a resident,  is to be called, under Philadelphia law, a "hotel" if the "guest" provides some payment, like bringing flowers, and therefore the new "hotel owner" must purchase a $250/year hotel license and pay other fees for health inspections.  So that the first time your mother slept over and brought you a gift, you'd have to go buy a $250 hotel license and meet your local health inspector. Would you consider this a tax on family and friends visiting your home? Or would you accept that what you are doing is being a hotel and so you should just pay for the business license? I think you'd call it a "personal visitor tax" and not accept that you now own a hotel.  It's the same logic. You do not own a hotel. You are not a freelance writer. Instead, you own a home. You put some thoughts into a blog.

So, the central question is whether a hobby, like blogging, is a business? If you believe blogging is a business then a business license is reasonable for you but if you believe that blogging is not a business, but a hobby,  but is being defined and targeted in particular by Philadelphia as a business because there are so many people who blog and so it can sell a lot of licenses, then  it's a blog tax because they classified blogs as businesses, on purpose, in particular, for a financial windfall. Period.

Further playing the semantic game, where I live, blogging is considered a hobby and therefore does not require a business license. As I am not under Philadelphia jurisdiction, I am therefore, for yet another reason, semantically speaking, absolutely accurate in calling this a "blog tax."

Jerry

Your comments and view are most welcome!!


Reuters 23-Aug-2010
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