I hope that was a "gift" too...
More like a curse, amirite?
(reminds himself he bought his brother this game for his birthday in November)
I got an interesting email from Humble a little while ago. It said that because Louisiana is now enforcing use taxes on internet purchases, they will have to charge me state tax on my subscription. Jokes on them (?) because I have an annual sub.
Cool. Soapbox time.
I have a real problem with this concept. Inherent to the notion of charging use taxes for internet purchases is that a tangible good is being delivered to a place in the state from a place outside of the state and that the purchaser has effectively avoided paying sales tax on that purchase that would normally go to the state coffers by making said purchase out-of-state. At least, that's how I understand it from my non-economist point of view. This makes perfect sense when I'm ordering a book or a toaster or some other physical commodity from Amazon (which has charged state taxes for years in the case of Louisiana), but considerably less sense when I'm buying an MP3 from Amazon (for which Amazon also charges tax) or a digital game from Humble. There is no place that I'm going to go in the state to buy this intangible good in the first place, so there's no true loss of sales tax revenue in that sense. What's the rationale here, that I'd buy a CD with that music from a Barnes and Noble or hard copy of that game from GameStop if it weren't for that meddling internet? No, this is basically a backhanded kind of income tax from my perspective. The state's basically charging a penalty not because there is potential lost revenue in any real sense, but strictly because I'm choosing to spend money on anything at all.
It rained on my soapbox so I'm going home.
Edited by warreni, 04 January 2019 - 02:36 AM.