Chicago successfully taxes streaming services
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Chicago has a narrower group of people to draw from so besides tourist and sin taxes they have to go after any product consumed by residents of the city and that includes digital.
Why is this all happening, because there is a well hidden largess in government employee payroll and worse in their pension system. Illinois alone is estimated to have over twenty three thousand retirees pulling down one hundred thousand dollars a year or more. A lot of this is from the higher end positions in city and county governments but you can find police and fire there too.
People complain about the disparity in corporate executive level pay to employee should also take a look at the disparity between the same in state and city governments let alone the disparity in retirement to even every day workers in the state. A 100k retirement not counting full benefits is equivalent to nearly forty eight dollars an hour.
So expect more digital taxes in your future.
PS: the Chicago debt is only for pensions, they are down tens of billions more in deferred maintenance and similar debts.
Because the politician who agrees to the largess will be long gone before the bill comes due.
Not sure how to fix this, but generally I think some sort of additional checks and balances should be required whenever government takes on huge future liabilities.
Time horizon arbitrage.
The elected politicians care about things looking good the next 4 years. The employee unions care about the life long outcome for their members.
The Chicago police department isn’t exactly what most people would call “quality”.
Even a garbage collector is three times more likely to die on the job than a police officer.
https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
A valid takeaway from the cited list is that being a police officer isn't literally the most dangerous thing you can do for work. An invalid takeaway is that being a police officer isn't dangerous.
Fatal injuries per
Rank Job 100k workers
==== =============================== =================
1. Fishers 100.0
2. Logging workers 87.3
3. Aircraft pilots 51.3
4. Roofers 45.2
5. Refuse material collectors 34.9
6. Steel workers 33.3
7. Truck drivers 26.9
8. Farmers, ranchers 24.0
9. Groundskeeping workers 21.0
10. Electrical power-line installers 18.6
11. Misc agricultural workers 17.7
12. Construction workers 17.4
13. Helpers, construction trades 17.3
14. Maintenance and repair workers 16.6
15. Grounds maintenance workers 15.9
16. Construction laborers 14.3
17. Mechanics 13.1
18. Police 12.9
19. Construction equipment operators 11.8
20. Mining machine operators 11.7
21. Taxi drivers 10.5
22. Athletes 9.5
23. Painters 8.9
24. Firefighters 8.9
25. Electricians 8.4https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/updates/upd-2-12-18.html
But as far as retiring when your fitness wanes. How is that any different than any other job that requires manual labor?
Also from the article.
Leading causes included heart attacks and strokes, which caused 18 deaths. And 15 officers died due to cancers that the NLEOMF says were "related to search and recovery efforts after the attack on the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001."
Assuming surviving one year does not impact the likelihood of dying the next year, over a 20 year career a police officer then has a 0.26% chance of dying in the line of duty. We can expect that slightly greater than two out of every 1,000 officers will die prior to retirement.
___________________
https://www.ajc.com/news/world/these-are-the-deadliest-jobs-...
https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
Does that mean we should pay garbage collectors more in hazard pay than police?
You started by saying that the claim that police officers risk their lives is statistically inaccurate, with a citation. I countered that citation with one of my own and a calculation showing they do risk their lives. Now you are talking about garbage collectors and their exposure to risk being greater than that of police officers.
That doesn't really counter my point about police officers' lives being exposed to risk, because I never made a claim that police officers are exposed to more risk than garbage collectors. Likewise I'm not forwarding a normative point about whether or not people should be paid commensurate with the amount of risk they encounter in their professional work. I am making the narrow, positive point which is that, objectively speaking, police officers are exposed to risk (and this is borne out by statistics).
I'm not in a position to make a normative claim about whether or not (or how much, in an absolute sense) we should compensate people more for risking their lives. I'm not sure if you were expecting me to say that garbage collectors shouldn't be paid more than police officers in hazard pay. But if we are assuming a system that pays commensurate with risk, then I'm happy to agree it would be internally consistent to pay garbage collectors more than police officers in hazard pay, sure.
Police and fire employees tend to live shorter lives due to specific conditions related their occupation. It’s apples and oranges.
As for firefighters, it's literally no more deadly than being a painter (8.9 fatal injuries per 100k). They're both climbing tall ladders with one hand. It may not be romantic to say that, but that's the actuarial science.
[0] https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
[1] https://consumer.healthday.com/encyclopedia/work-and-health-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/br09xb/bystander_vi...
>A recent study suggested that overweight and obesity were more prevalent among law enforcement personnel than the general population (Ramey, Downing, & Franke, 2009) and lack of regular physical exercise is one of the occupational risk factors contributing to the higher prevalence of elevated blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, and CVD among emergency responders such as police officers (Kales, Tsismenakis, Zhang, & Soteriades, 2009).
Lay off the donuts.
Cutting pensions now would be like cutting someone’s salary and would likely lead to skilled people quitting.
That doesn't taste right to me.
I think the current folks are hosed because raising taxes on the middle and working class along with rich people is unpopular so I don’t think elected officials will want to do that. So they will probably chug along and then go bankrupt, hosing pensioners.
30 years later, the pension holders are dead, or your company is. Either way, it’s no longer a problem.
Is there a difference in Silicon Valley workers being promised future stock if they just forgo their paycheck for a little while longer? The Difference of courses that taxpayers don’t foot the difference.
1) stock options are a known volatile thing rather than a government backed guarantee.
2) Missed Stock options are much easier to compensate for financially than a pension. If you miss stock options, you are still part of the wage pool. If you miss a pension that is much harder. After all, the point of a pension is to take care of people who are 'worn out'. Hence, there is much less of a fall-back system for missed pensions.
Well, yes. It would be a default. But more money has been spent than is there and there are only three pools to draw from: taxpayers, services and creditors. (Creditors include both pensioners and bond holders.) At this point, multiple pools have to be hosed. It’s just a matter of when and to what degree, with the hosing being less extreme the earlier it’s dealt with.
In all likelihood, the city will go bankrupt and have creditors cut services in federal bankruptcy proceedings, thereby imperilling the city’s long-term tax base. State, being unable to go bankrupt, will probably hose creditors more.
People's eyes glaze over when talking about their own 401k, what chance is there for voters to get into the nitty gritty about multiple government agencies' pension liabilities and investments at the city/county/state/federal level?
I suggest you research the laws surrounding pensions in Canada. Answering the questions properly here is too lengthy, but they could probably be answered by 30 minutes of research. Pensions are incredibly powerful for looking after retirees. In fact, Canada has a federal pension plan called CPP which pays out to all Canadians based upon their contributions over their lifetime. Pensions are not the enemy my friend, it's elected representatives who look out for their short term interests instead of the health of their electorate.
https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/research-economic-analysis/canad...
Look up the Ontario public teachers pension plan, OTPP. It has its own quite extensive wiki page.
Spoiler: it has more assets than the entire state of PA public pension fund (by a factor of 6, if I recall)
Getting a fund to work is not hard, and given the massive economic growth that america has seen in the past 30 years alone, even the most conservative fund would be doing impressively well.
All of these things are easy.
The only thing which I have heard and seen which is a problem is people/politicians coming in and breaking the compact made with emoloyees 10, 15 years down the line.
At that point the fund gets drawn down and you can easily get a scenario like today.
The spenders are no longer in office and the obligations are coming Due.
The US Postal System has essentially this exact problem every year - they aren’t making enough to cover their pension obligations so they keep raising stamp prices (and let’s not get started on the absurdly short-term solution of “forever” stamps). Since they’re a government agency but independent and unable to accept funding from any other method it’s a great example of the problem.
>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach.
>Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.
https://taxfoundation.org/primer-postal-service-retiree-heal...
Speaking for the UK, ‘national insurance’ is a direct transfer from young to old.
I think people are leaving Chicago over solvency/funding outlook issues. I have two barely wealthy (single digit millions, almost surely) friends in Chicago who are moving to Arizona and Texas because they worry they're among the juiciest targets to be squeezed in the upcoming years.
(1) Pension decisions play out potentially over ~30-40 years.
(2) If we accept that the cause is some official made a bad decision, it is almost certain that pension issues will be ongoing. There is potentially a 40 year window for idiots to get in and screw the whole system up.
So in a sense, some large group of people need to be responsible. Not because it is fair, but because if that isn't how we treat the situation it isn't likely to get fixed for the next round of pension crises. The pensioners were most invested in the success of the enterprise. They are most responsible for its failure.
This isn't a nice position to hold, but the alternatives are a very nebulous concepts of blame and lumping the cost of fixing all the mistakes on the one group of people who we know weren't responsible - people who are currently entering or in the workforce and can pay taxes.
Just phase them out and switch to 401ks. It’s absurd that such a large portion of government budgets are retirement accounts.
The unwinding is the terribly difficult part because the can keeps getting kicked down the road due to a combination of greed and incompetence. You need back pressure from financial markets to inhibit borrowing for what can never be paid back. Then the hard conversations are forced.
You simply stop giving new workers pensions, and you offer buyouts to the existing workers. None of this is fast, nor did I say it was. Even if you did it today, we're talking probably at least another 50 years before the last pension is paid out. Meanwhile, You're still dealing with the problems of running a pension plan, but at least you're on a path to divest from them.
This strategy is basically what every old company with pensions is doing. The problem here, is that governments don't do it, in large part due to the unions. I don't blame the unions for insisting on pensions, they're a good deal if you've got one But the fact is they're unsustainable. Unlike a company, the government is never going to go out of business, it's just going to become a retirement plan with a police force.
Disclaimer: actively seeking ways to short Illinois/Chicago.
Even Buffett says he’s looking at state finances when deciding investment options, and if he’s saying it, surely other organizations are too. It will be a gradual accelerating decline though (barring effects of natural disasters), since people don’t just up and move.
>except for certain few rich areas in and around the big cities that the richer populace is “escaping to”
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-senate-passes-bill-b...
I don't think the pensioners are free of fault here.
Land of the fee, home of the slave.
That doesn’t seem unreasonable.
40 years ago that person probably started off below $15k/year.
(In 1979 average household income was $19,553) https://www.multpl.com/us-average-income/table/by-year
It’s also the classic tradeoff of government work: lower salary than you could get in the private market, but retirement equivalent to a higher salary than you could get. Compelling only if you are sufficiently long term oriented.
Start at age 20, making $15,000/y, increasing 5% per year. (Salary at retirement over $100k/y)
Assume annual savings rate of 15%
8% return
Retire at 60.
I get around a million dollars saved at age 60 (i.e. today). Not enough to buy an annuity that pays out over $100,000/y. Off by a factor of 2 or so, I think.
And starting salary 40 years ago was probably under 15k, 8% consistent compounded returns are really good, the other retirement benefits besides the pension etc.
Also, $75k is a lot more that most people make. From what I can find, that would be ~85th percentile of personal income, or around the 60th percentile of household income.
Edit: Some representative (although a bit outdated) sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Chicago police officers make $65k within 18 months [0]. If $75k is a high estimate, it’s not by a ton. Government competes for professional/managerial/educated employees as well.
[0] https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/August-2...
Get employee. Put money in pension fund. Let fund grow. Wait 20 years earn interest and pay employee.
end.
What you are describing is gross mismanagement of funds, and blaming the rightful recipients of funds for the existing.
That's the problem, politicians don't care about 20 years from now. They care about their next election.
Pensions are partially the outcome of wishful result-oriented thinking ("workers should have pensions they can depend on, so make the promise first and then the solution will happen").
That’s a bond. Why does that have anything to do with a pension ?
And who in his right mind plants a bond and links it to a pension ? How does that even work?
A bond is a loan. That means the firm or institution is taking a loan.
A pension is the opposite of that - it’s money taken from employee payments and added to a conservative fund with a time horizon of 20-30 years. This allows them to make long term plans which avoid the risks of high beta and risk stocks or deals.
So as your economy goes up, your fund goes up and you pay people off with the interest.
Something changed/went wrong, long before you got to the bond.
There is nothing more "conservative" in investing than bonds ( particularly treasury bonds ).
Nobody "plants" a bond and links it to a pension. A pension buys bonds, stocks, etfs, etc which hopefully grows in value or pays healthy interest.
The problem is if the pension doesn't do as well as expected or the ratio of workers to retirees gets too skewed and they can't meet their defined payouts.
But even they will not produce enough for the benefits that are promised: as soon as someone outlives their contribution the fund might not be actuarially safe. It turns out it is exceedingly difficult to mitigate all risk in a retirement fund, and government makes the promise that if they fail, they will pass the bill to someone else.
Pension funds are truly evil.
So if you're putting money into a system, and you know it's not enough to cover your benefits, you're not exactly just a innocent victim here. You're benefitting from a system that you know is broken.
The money did exist. Workers pay into the pensions as part of their compensation package.
Chicago borrowed against the actual pension accounts and corruption/incompetence drained them. Then they did scoop and throw methods for two decades to avoid having the pensions land on their heads.
There is a ton or corruption in Chicago. I have a friend who works for Idot. They have a lot of workers on the payroll who are making 6 figures. My friend has never seen these people who are supposed to be his co-workers show up for work, and when he asked he was told "Don't bring it up. Over your head. We can't fire them."
Firstly pension funds are conservative in their estimates, they aren’t growth funds.
And what precisely is anyone supposed to do? NOT put money into a fund ?
The only option other than a pension plan is to put it in a more risky fund. Which means your investment would be blown out post 2008.
AND that means your benefit from that job changes, making it less likely for you to join a government job -at all.
There’s a huge amount of discussion here that seems to have nothing to do with pension funds, but some bizarre form of fund which you should be blamed for partaking or being a dependent of through your job.
One is a fund you pay into and at the end you get whatever it's worth.
The other is a scheme you pay into which guarantees a set payout at the end. It's that which often causes problems, because the scheme has promised payouts that significantly exceed their investments if they have assumed greater growth than they get.
Not really.
This is not a problem that will be solved with taxes, it will be solved with a global reset, and those are usually accompanied by major wars. This is not a Chicago problem, an Illinois problem or even an American problem.
The tax began its life as an extension/adaptation of an existing 9% "amusement tax" on patrons of amusements (movie theaters, bowling alleys, etc) in the city. But until 2015 it only included physical businesses, not any of the new online replacements. The definition is now expanded to include online games, streaming movies, movie tickets sold online, etc.
Also, this has been in effect for a while now (e.g. my Netflix bill went up by $0.99 a year ago) and all the various online businesses have already implemented it. Not sure why the article is bubbling up now, just as the new mayor is about to take office. :)
For more history see https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/05/29/chi...
On the other hand, this is an obvious opportunity for payment processors to automate. I’m surprised sales tax still isn’t built in to stripe, for example.
Having owned two businesses, I can say it's a lot more complicated than most people realize. Tax rates and reporting don't fit neatly into city, state, or even simple ZIP Code boundaries. Plus different products, even sold from the same food truck to use your example, can have different tax rates.
The whole retail taxing system is a mess.
I don't see why any company would implement this, perhaps appeasing regulators at the federal level.
You’re not required to do business there, but they can fine you for non-compliance if you are doing business.
Note: all of this is in reference to “software companies” as the GP said, and doesn’t touch on “corporate nexus” and stuff like that.
Obviously, governments interpret the situation in the way that accrues them maximal power and brings the most activity into their purview.
Extradition would be quite reasonable if you were conducting a very large business, and/or ignoring significant laws, e.g. prohibition on human trafficking. But they aren't going to extradite you for failing to be GDPR compliant on $10 of app sales.
They'd have no repercussions except to block my site - and I'm guessing they didn't intend GDPR to turn into an internet filter.
An explicit law would need to be made in your jurisdiction forcing you to comply with their laws. I'm not aware of any such thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.
Check out Avalara and TaxJar. They're not 'built in to Stripe' but have hundreds of integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, and more.
Even Netflix charges sales tax (or VAT, such as in Europe) in locations that require it (based off your billing address), so I find it hard to see this kind of thing as anything more than greedy governments taxing something simply because they can and know it’s big money.
And by the way, big companies will figure it out because they have entire departments to deal with garbage like that. It's the small companies that suffer from this bureaucracy.
Other levels of government are not permitted to charge sales tax, or even income tax. Most cities' primary sources of income are property tax and development fees.
I'm confused how the legal thinking goes that a company not based in Chicago, offering services on the internet, can be taxed.
(They don't even ship DVDs to most customers, whereas Amazon was shipping physical goods)
Same thing with concert tickets and other forms of entertainment.
Or alternatively, could Netflix ban all residents of Chicago?
As a related thing, look at Spotify vs Apple on the App Store. That 30% is material.
2. It becomes burdensome for businesses to comply so they ask the federal government to occupy the field and standardize.
I don't really know why people expect businesses that deliver their products digitally to be treated differently from everyone else.
Most states with sales tax have since passed legislation to tax online purchases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.
edit: It seems as though HN's linkification drops trailing periods, so that link doesn't work when clicked.
I'm not necessarily anti-tax, but I don't envy a developer who needs to track down to the township level who taxes what in what way while providing goods across the entire USA.
Tickets for local events are one thing. It's not clear to me that a city tax on a streaming service meets the tests that the Supreme Court said should be met.
If people could see the some total of the various taxes they pay, they'd be shocked. I'd love it if Stripe or other payment processors started reporting taxes to credit card companies so we could see the total sales and other taxes we paid across all transactions on top of our income taxes.
But digital goods and services? The city already taxes internet connectivity, property tax, ... Taxing digital goods further is just double taxation, with no benefit provided in return by the city to the consumer, or producer of digital goods
THIS is why you see rich cities like San Francisco and Chicago preaching ever higher taxes, while simultaneously providing worse services for it's citizens.
There's a feedback loop missing where there are actual consequences to the city council when quality of service isn't delivered, but instead, city politicians indulge in emotionally appealing demagoguery, further increase taxes, line their pockets and continue to not deliver
If you live in SF and make 90k you're taxed the same if you made same amount in North Dakota somewhere. Make sense??? One is touching upper class status wise and other is one less paycheck away from being homeless.
Right now we have income, capital, sales, bunch of business taxes, ... Each state City county has its own rate. Whenever it comes to taxes we seem to accept everything, it's taboo subject to talk negatively about any aspect of it despite there being real inefficiencies and better alternatives
We were so excited for the promise of the Internet to overturn all this legacy bullshit. Then the legacy bullshitters got here, built a bunch of proprietary services on top of HTTP, marketed them as progress, and are slowly reimplementing the status quo!
The Internet option, piracy, has been here the whole time. It's just "inconvenient" people say, as they repeatedly complain about new inconveniences caused by centralized services. In reality, it's simply the poverty mindset - a little bit of self-actualizing work today would pay off tenfold down the road.
I look forward to the next phase of storage getting cheap enough, along with streaming services fragmenting themselves, that it becomes trendy to trade USB keys with friends.
That's an interesting point. There are internet services that don't require an address to pay for something. What are their legal obligations, if any, with respect to local taxes? I assume quite a few local laws don't explicitly make this a loophole, so does that mean anyone doing business online has the legal obligation to collect address information? That would be an odd situation, and it doesn't seem to be the one we're in.
It seems like the situation on the ground is that in reality only companies big enough to attract attention are at risk from this. My understanding of the legal situation is that the federal government in the United States provides the legal basis for ensuring that a business in one state or city abides by the laws of another state or city when it sells to its residents. But they seem uninterested in actually enforcing this.
It's interesting to think about what would happen to companies of various sizes should they refuse to implement this tax. Small / medium size companies? Probably nothing. In fact it's unlikely that many of them will implement it. Suppose Netflix refuses; it now becomes illegal for Chicago residents to purchase Netflix subscriptions (unless they have some mechanism for the citizens to pay the taxes themselves, as some states do; this usually doesn't happen though). But Netflix can say "no problem", we just make web servers available over the Internet, we don't check whether someone's logging in from Chicago. What does Chicago do? They either ban the Netflix domain at the local internet level, or (more likely) they get the Federal government involved and have fines put in place to penalize Netflix for not paying taxes to Chicago.
I'm not a lawyer though, and it would be interesting to get one's point of view of one here since questions about jurisdiction come up here all the time, e.g. whether US companies have to comply with EU laws.
So those limits end up being defined by what is actually practical to enforce. Which is why the technical environment ends up being quite important, and the web 2.0 surveillance industry is ultimately the enemy of Free people - it is vaccination for the state [0]. If Chicago ended up failing here, we could chuckle at the corrupt politicians making nonsensical laws and then quickly forget. But rather, success means that other municipalities will be looking to get on this gravy train.
Then, even if there is eventual pushback where online services start explicitly forgoing obtaining users' addresses, there will be enough money behind it to fund that grinding at the courts. Eventually it will be declared that doing business and not obtaining the identity of your customer is illegal, presuming an intent to evade all of these "duly enacted" backwoods laws.
[0] FWIW Bitcoin is in the same class, as it negligently lacks the standard property of untraceability.
Chicago: Okay fine we talked to all the local ISPs and you're no longer accessible in our city. Have a nice day.
or
Chicago: We didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday guys, have you heard of this thing called GeoIP services?
Besides, I'm sure Netflix is bound by all kinds of territory-based licensing to need people's addresses. Like if Foobar Productions did a deal with someone else for exclusive digital rights to Austria and Australia but is letting Netflix license their show for streaming everywhere else, Netflix needs to be able to not show it to the Austr(al)ians.
And yes, obviously the totalitarian matrix is interconnected. GeoIP is a symptom of that cancer - the legacy status quo attempting to make the Internet conform to its preconceived notions. Which is why I pointed the way towards the Internet-first solution.
You can provide a zip code, or a full address, or the card security code, or a name, and those will be checked and you will be told if they match the information on file with the card issuer, but it is up to you whether or not mismatches should block the transaction.
Transactions with mismatches generally have a higher risk of being fraudulent, so it is a good idea to not go through with transactions when the data doesn't match because if you put through too many fraudulent charges bad things can happen to you, ranging from higher fees to having your ability to accept cards revoked.
> We were so excited for the promise of the Internet to overturn all this legacy bullshit. Then the legacy bullshitters got here, built a bunch of proprietary services on top of HTTP, marketed them as progress, and are slowly reimplementing the status quo!
I don't understand your point. The tax Chicago is trying to impose has nothing to do with Netflix's service being proprietary. The tax would still be charged even if their service were built entirely out of free software and all they streamed was public domain material, as long as they charged for the service.
If a user couldn't simply `git clone` and then http://localhost/ , that would still be a proprietary service. Even if a foundation is free - HTTP/TCP/IP or even Free software as in your example - services built on top are not necessarily so.
My point is that Netflix is better viewed as yet another cable company, rather than as some champion of the Internet. This is especially relevant to Net Neutrality, for understanding when Netflix will turncoat - they aren't going to be standing up for p2p rights.
[1] Sales taxes often vary depending on the type of good. E.g., some states might charge a different rate for food ingredients than they do for prepared food, or for food sold through a vending machine. The tax service companies assign a code to each category of goods that might have a different tax rate so that when you ask them to computer tax on an order you can supply the appropriate codes for each line item so they can compute the right tax.
It's so bad that illinois is the only state in the union with a negative population growth. And, doubly, the only state to have that honor several years in a row.
The debt is unsustainable and they tax everything. Just a few years ago they started taxing soda cans, and hybrids since "they don't pay as much gas tax".
They may have successfully taxed streaming but it's just another example of how incredibly desperate they are.
Illinois is drowning under pension promises from their massively bloated government. Enough that every Illinois citizen owes something like $20,000 to the state pension systems. They're squeezing money from stones
Cook county (Chicago) and the 5 suburban counties contribute more revenue to the state coffers than the entire rest of the state combined. The rest of the state receives a higher share of that revenue than Chicago and its suburbs (ie - they get more than they put in). [1]
> The situation is worse than detriot before it's bankrupcy.
Highly subjective, but having personally lived in the Detroit area before its bankruptcy - and currently living in Chicago now - I disagree.
> It's so bad that illinois is the only state in the union with a negative population growth.
Not so. Multiple states have experienced negative population growth year over year; and multiple states had experienced it multiple years in a row. [2][3][4][5]
Your comment is demonstrably, factually incorrect. Please support your opinions with facts, or label them as your own opinions.
1. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105...
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R7AN4o7m3coGcnWSJsKd...
3. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/popu...
4. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/popu...
5. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2...
Before accusing me of being factually incorrect you should read your sources
The sources cited disprove that. Don’t move the goalposts.
I’m also not disputing every aspect of your comment, which is why I didn’t address it.
Secondly, it lacks focus on cost efficiency or assessing cost effectiveness in how the tax payer's money is being spent. I don't know the situation in Chicago very well, but my inclination is to discount any source as irrelevant if it doesn't address how efficiently tax dollars get converted into desired services.
Finally it seems more concerned with diverting the reader's attention towards national politics, particularly Trump's election and why voters voted for him.
Specifically it’s a response to the GP saying “Chicago is a financial disaster and it's dragging Illinois into the fire.” If that were the case, it stands to reason that the state would be spending all its money there - however, we don’t see that. Page 23, I think, illustrates it well.
> I don’t know the situation in Chicago very well
I doubt that most people on the thread do; or they would know this whole “Netflix” tax is actually old news. Chicago ruled that Netflix was subject to the tax back in 2015. ;)
Regarding discounting sources as irrelevant if they don’t address inefficiency - wouldn’t that rule out most sources that talk about ... well, practically anything political?
In the case of c they will most likely continue to develop new stuff, based on their revenues elsewhere, but at that point the high tax areas are leaching of other low tax areas where the company can afford to fund innovation.
That assumes that you can find out when a company increase prices based on higher taxes, as opposed to anything else, which you cannot do.
The only real solution is to tell the retirees that they are not getting the money they counted on; that is hardly unfair as I am sure nobody here expects there to be any retirement funds for them, except what they can save up.