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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
Click here for original story
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