Maybe you haven’t heard: One of Gov. O’Malley’s tax proposals this year is to extend the sales tax to digital products. That means digital media you download: ebooks, apps, music, newspapers, videos, ringtones, audio greeting cards and more could become subject to the state’s sales tax of 6 percent. So that 99 cents iTunes song you buy would cost around $1.05.
After reading the bill further, Sentementes found something interesting.
From the bill‘s list of what would be taxed:
(V) A NEWSPAPER, MAGAZINE, PERIODICAL, CHAT ROOM DISCUSSION, WEBLOG, OR OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCT THAT IS TRANSFERRED ELECTRONICALLY.
As Gus points out, it isn’t clear to which blogs this would apply. Would it be only blogs behind a paywall like those of Gus’s employer The Baltimore Sun (kudos to Gus for using that word – there were rumors of a crackdown on the usage of it by Sun staff when the paywall started.)
Presumably it could include some of the pay RSS feeds Amazon does for Kindle as well. There’s also an Amazon tax like other states have tried, according to Sentementes.
Depending on how the bill would attempt to tax blogs there are definite free speech questions.
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I’m guessing it’d only apply to weblogs behind a pay wall, but the devil is in the details.
[...] IN MARYLAND, a tax on blogs? [...]
A sales tax on chat room discussions?
What’s six percent of nothing?
Commentary is just that. I can’t imagine how one would put a ‘value’ on a comment (like the one I’m writing just now!) so that you could tax it.
But coming up with a value might lead to some interesting, er, ‘commentary’ itself: for example, what’s a comment at the Huffington Post worth versus one at the Wall Street Journal? I think I know…
I think you’re on the right track here, Steve. Of course it wouldn’t apply to blogs. Sales tax by definition applies to things that are sold.
This doesn’t sound to different from NYS where online purchases are taxed. It’s annoying but, well, sales tax is annoying.
Don ‘t the people of MD ever get tired of this nonsense? Excuse me I meant The People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland
Yes, some of us do, in fact, get tired of this nonsense. The problem is, we’re vastly outvoted by morons who don’t know how to think for themselves and instead vote straight-blue. Because the state will always take care of them….
i got so sick of maryland’s “governement” tat I moved south after 40 years to a big red state.
It still has a lot of cronism but it pales in comparison to murlann.
Do you mean the Sheeple of MD ?
If you add the ObamaCare logic to this law, they could also tax you for not transferring the electronic communication.
Because if you had transfered the knowledge, it would have affected commerce
or some BS unintended consequence.
I left the states long ago, but i still hear the rumors that the Eastern Shore & Southern Md wants to sucede from the rest of LiberalLand
How / why do the citizens manage to vote such a freakin’ moron into office?!? One day the idiots that vote for trash like O’Malley just MIGHT (nothing’s assured here folks) figure out what a huckster p.o.s. he and his ilk really are.
What about blogs that get income from ads or donations?
[...] sales tax of 6 percent. So that 99 cents iTunes song you buy would cost around $1.05.My friend Jeff Quinton at QuintonReport.com alerted me to this outrage and got an Instalanche out of it. And this could be the last staw for me.I’ve lived in [...]
Hmmmm.So in the “Free State”,we get taxed for free speech.What a shock…….not.
[...] devil’s in the details when it comes to the proposal by Martin O’Malley to tax all digital downloads. As I noted on my other site, one part of the proposal would have Maryland putting a tax on blogs. [...]