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Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

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Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#191

Post by 420codebro »

Shivetya wrote: post #14

Chicago is in the hole for nearly thirty billion dollars. They have been floating the idea of a ten billion dollar bond with the debt structured in a way which lets current politicians escape the fallout from its payment and not having to raise property taxes. The state of Illinois is not well off either with debts estimated at the low of one hundred thirty billion to two hundred fifty billion. An Illinois proposal j…

Lol Chicago and Illinois in general are a fuckin shithole. I welcome their downfall.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#192

Post by sgregnt »

cljs-js-eval wrote: post #91
rrrrreeeee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the employees and employers not pay into a separate fund that cannot be touched? I fail to see how it's the fault of the pensioners. It's absolutely archaic if the future taxpayers have to pay for a retirees pension. In Canada we have pension funds that are separately funded entities that are payed into over an employee's career.

It's archaic and should be changed, but the way the system works in the U.S. is pretty well known to its citizens, which makes it at least partially the fault of the pensioners. I live in Chicago and every retired schoolteacher and police officer I meet knows full well that they're making an exceptional amount of money in retirement. It's usually part of why they took the job.

That's how socialism works: you spend someone's else money.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#193

Post by toomuchtodo »

sct202 wrote: post #92
rrrrreeeee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the employees and employers not pay into a separate fund that cannot be touched? I fail to see how it's the fault of the pensioners. It's absolutely archaic if the future taxpayers have to pay for a retirees pension. In Canada we have pension funds that are separately funded entities that are payed into over an employee's career.

In Illinois and Chicago, the government has been playing games like declaring pension holidays where the contributions shift to the future. The unions control a large base of voters and haven't objected, even though this basically endangers their retirements. There's going to be a point where the funds will literally run out of money, and I doubt that there will be enough things to tax in a year to make up the differ…

What boggles my mind is that bond rating agencies rate Illinois debt at any rating that allows continued borrowing when it is so obvious how bad and deep the financial hole is.

Disclaimer: actively seeking ways to short Illinois/Chicago.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#194

Post by Eridrus »

whack wrote: post #23

Instead of trying to tax purely digital activities, why not just raise the income/property taxes on the people who live or work in your city? This would be a lot less regressive, and would prevent people from getting around it just by changing their credit card billing address. Not to mention the beauracratic nightmare of requiring SaaS companies to keep track of every customer's physical address and local tax regula…

Because it's easier politically to implement regressive taxes. Property owners in particular are politically powerful and sympathetic. They're also very motivated because the tax increases would be large and these folks are highly leveraged in their investment. So we get things like Prop 13 in CA, or property tax increase caps in NY.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#195

Post by drewbug01 »

nullwasamistake wrote: post #152
drewbug01 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chicago is a financial disaster and it's dragging Illinois into the fire. 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 su…

Your own references show that Illinois is the only state with negative population growth for the last 5 years straight. Illinois financial state is totally unprecedented, and you didn't even bother arguing my point that the debt is equivalent to 20k per citizen. Before accusing me of being factually incorrect you should read your sources

You stated that Illinois was the only state to experience negative population growth, and the only one to experience multiple years in a row.

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.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#196

Post by drewbug01 »

RandomTisk wrote: post #182
drewbug01 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chicago is a financial disaster and it's dragging Illinois into the fire. 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 su…

Your first source is quite flawed IMO. For one, they focus on the idea that the impetus behind the Tea Party movement was some kind of schizophrenic notion of citizens wanting both low taxes but also many high-quality public services. The Tea Party in the Boston harbor wasn't simply about taxation, it was about representation or lack there of. The modern Tea Party that sprang up under Obama was quite similar in that…

I’m inclined to agree that the source isn’t great, but it’s also the only one I’ve found that directly addresses the “Chicago is the root of our problems” mentality found in IL politics. Looking past the commentary of the paper, I think the data is sound.

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?

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#197

Post by SeeDave »

burlesona wrote: post #5

This stuff makes sense for cities, it’s just frustrating how much more difficult it makes it to operate a “mom and pop” software business. The complexity of potentially complying with hundreds of state and municipal governments - not where you are located but where online purchases originate - is a pretty significant deterrent to setting up a small side business. Imagine if every food truck had to pay taxes based not…

> The complexity of potentially complying with hundreds of state and municipal governments - not where you are located but where online purchases originate - is a pretty significant deterrent to setting up a small side business.

Check out Avalara and TaxJar. They're not 'built in to Stripe' but have hundreds of integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, and more.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#198

Post by toomuchtodo »

jonathankoren wrote: post #165
unchocked wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re saying it’s most reasonable to hold the pensioners responsible, but that’s a subtle difference and you weren’t reading closely anyhow.

Except that’s not how responsibility works. They may be the beneficiaries of a broken system, but they aren’t necessarily — and certainly not solely — the ones that broke it. Just phase them out and switch to 401ks. It’s absurd that such a large portion of government budgets are retirement accounts.

The problem when you say “just phase them out” is what to do with the trillions in outstanding obligations. For example, pension benefits are protected by the Illinois state constitution. You can imagine the process you’d need to construct and execute to fix pensions in Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago’s cases.

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.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#199

Post by lotsofpulp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #193
sct202 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Illinois and Chicago, the government has been playing games like declaring pension holidays where the contributions shift to the future. The unions control a large base of voters and haven't objected, even though this basically endangers their retirements. There's going to be a point where the funds will literally run out of money, and I doubt that there will be enough things to tax in a year to make up the differ…

What boggles my mind is that bond rating agencies rate Illinois debt at any rating that allows continued borrowing when it is so obvious how bad and deep the financial hole is. Disclaimer: actively seeking ways to short Illinois/Chicago.

They are rating the chances of default. The bond purchasers will be paid, one way or another. Privatize the parking meters (like Chicago already did), the roads, the water utilities, etc. It's the people who live there that will pay for the deficit via increased taxes and fewer services.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#200

Post by malandrew »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #33
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we keep doing this to ourselves with government jobs? 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.

Easy to fix, ban long term compensation agreements. If a union wants an annuity, they can go buy it from an insurance company. No need to negotiate anything other than cash salaries. Unfortunately, not enough taxpayers vote to offset the government workers voting themselves benefits as a bloc.

And sadly every time we grow the size of government by assigning more responsibilities to government, the larger that voting bloc grows. In states favoring big government, this can only end badly. Although they can always raise taxes to address shortfalls, this has limits as it eventually drives those paying the most taxes to low-tax states.
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