Watching out for taxpayers on the ‘Net

He’s got our back on this one.  The current moratorium on taxes levied on Internet access is once again up for renewal by November 1 of this year.  Once again, Senator Sununu is out front to deny politicians yet another revenue stream and make the temporary moratorium permanent (The Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act)

“State and local politicians should not be allowed to use the popularity of the Internet as an opportunity to broaden their tax base. Simply put, taxing consumers for accessing the Web discourages Internet use, reduces investment, stifles innovation, and limits the services available to consumers,” Sununu said. “I am also developing legislation to expand the Internet tax ban in order to prevent discrepancies and harmful practices by certain taxation jurisdictions.”

To me, this is quite important.  Being a telecommuter, I live and die by my access to the Internet.  It might be one thing to be taxes as a percentage of the monthly charge, but heaven help me as an employee OR as a blogger if I have to pay on a data rate ($x/byte).  Not only would I have to pay it here at home, but I’d have to pay it AGAIN at our hosting site.  Depending on the rate considered "fair" by politicians, I would have to rethink how things operate here at the ‘Grok.  We do a lot of images, MP3s, and video – a rich multimedia site like ours effectively run as a no-profit -at-all ("profit? what profit" wonders TMEW) – would probably change in a hurry to stay open (thanks politicians that can’t say no to much of anyone or thing).
 

The Internet is "critically important to interstate and global commerce," Sununu said. "It makes no sense to have a national and global communications and business network to be subject to taxes by every state, city and county in the country."

That’s right.  I’m just an anecdote but…

…multiply that by millions who access the ‘Net everyday, and one can see how important taxpayer friendly policy will be; consumers may well have to re-prioritize their spending to decide what gets cut down as taxes, once again, go up. 

While businesses can generally pass that on to their consumers, this may not be so easy a thing to do.  Given that IT (Information Technology) has been such a large reason for our booming economy (due to IT’s "force multiplier" effect) and that state of the art IT requires the Internet and lots of it, this might wreak havoc on budgets and the ability to offer new and innovative services and products. 

Folks, we are talking LARGE sums of taxes, and given that we JUST got the "temporary" tax repealed for the Spanish-American war, let’s thank and support Sununu (and others, like Senators McCain (D-Ariz) and Wyden (D-Ore)) in this endeavor.

Here in NH, broadband access in the northern part of the state is seen as a big deal – there is little spread around this sparsely populated part of the Great North Woods.  State level politicians are arguing about getting it put in.  One of the large promises by Fair Point in its attempt to purchase the landline business of Verizon hinges on the ability to build out DSL to almost all possible subscribers of our rural state (and the less economically gifted [formerly known as "poor"] among us).

Taxes would not be helpful going forward to these folks.