[Discuss] Effort to repeal Mass Tax on Software Services

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 01:01:54PM -0400, Gordon Marx wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Jim Gasek <jim at gasek.net> wrote:
> 
> > -POLITICAL-
> > The soloution is to elect (help to get elected) people
> > who share our goals.
> 
> 
> "We" don't have goals, Jim. Plenty of "us" don't share a reflexive "oh
> taxes are bad" knee-jerk response.

Indeed many of us do, myself included; but this does not mean that,
having taken some time to read about the tax, we can't see that this
specific tax might be bad for us, and bad for our local economy.

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 01:54:13PM -0400, Gordon Marx wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) <
[...]
> > I think most people, and virtually all people on this list, would view
> > this tax as both unjust and counterproductive.  It certainly damages the
> > tech sector of the MA economy.
> >
> "Unjust" is pretty rich, coming from a white guy complaining about
> taxes.  

Certainly, there are different levels/severities of injustice; we tend
to care most about the ones which affect us directly.  That said...

> There are much greater miscarriages of justice accepted without
> comment or complaint (and sometimes, even with approval!) on a daily
> basis by members of this list.

While this is certainly true, I suspect very few such injustices are
relevant for discussion on this list.  The software services tax,
which directly affects many of the list members for reasons related to
the work they do relevant to the topic of this list, is.

> In a world where we've accepted the idea of income tax, sales tax, and
> business-profit-tax (there's probably a better word for this), it seems a
> little farfetched to say that "software services" is the red line that
> taxes can't cross.

I don't think anyone is saying that, exactly.  However the tax does
put Massachusetts software services businesses at an economic
disadvantage, and creates a hardship as such businesses scramble to
figure out if/how this new law, which was rather suddenly thrust upon
them, affects their business practices, and indirectly, their
relationships with their customers.  The biggest problem seems to be
the speed with which the bill was passed and implemented, allowing
essentially zero reaction time.


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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