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Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

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Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#121

Post by droithomme »

> The money that they’re not paying into the unemployment and disability systems is being picked up by the states and the taxpayers.

Isn't it true that independent contractors are not eligible for unemployment or disability claims?

Yes that's true.

Given that, it is false that the "cost" is being picked up by others, because there is no cost here.

And given that the state is seeking retroactive reimbursement for past years, all independent contractors in the state who worked at this during this time period should be retroactively reimbursed for times of unemployment and for disability issues. Odd the state's not offering that.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#122

Post by ivalm »

subsaharancoder wrote: post #99
IanCal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxation is, broadly, spent on citizens and citizens benefit from that. I pay taxes that cover the police as well as the schooling that lowers the chance of people around me having to resort to crime.

In the context of Uber vs NJ, the drivers are already remitting taxes as contractors. The $650M demand from the state isn't a driver initiative with them demanding "Uber needs to pay more taxes.." it's the state saying "What we've collected from drivers isn't enough and we want more from Uber.."

There are a lot of externalities to Uber operations that are currently being paid by the society, the state is simply collecting some compensation from Uber.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#123

Post by rozenmd »

jdnenej wrote: post #75
jdhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people think that drivers for Uber & Lyft shouldn't be treated as "contractors". I know I'm in the minority on this, but to me it seems that you can jump in and out of employment with Uber & Lyft quite easily, to the point that it does seem more like contract work. As an anecdote, I took a Lyft to the airport with someone who had stopped driving for 6 months in order to get started with a new full ti…

At least in Australia I think someone is only a contractor if they earn income from multiple different companies. If it's all from one then they are an employee.

Personal Services Income is great fun as a contractor (/s). Worth a read: https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Personal-services-income/

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#124

Post by pitaj »

andy_ppp wrote: post #118
pitaj wrote: post #53

Please don't quote with code blocks. It breaks formatting by forcing horizontal scrolling, and is especially bad on mobile. Requoted: > Employee and employer state Unemployment Insurance tax rates will apply to the first $34,400 of an employee’s earnings in 2019 (up from $33,700 in 2018). For 2019, employees are subject to a 0.0425% (.000425) Workforce Development Partnership Fund tax rate. The employee Unemployment…

The annoying thing is it’s 5 lines of css to fix in most browsers... https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/make-pre-text-wrap/

Yes except that breaks actual code, especially affecting mobile devices where wrapping can make it very difficult to follow.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#125

Post by scarejunba »

rsclient wrote: post #93
toomuchtodo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illinois: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-illinois-pensions/illinoi... (Illinois' unfunded pension liability climbs to $133.5 billion) https://www.policyed.org/pension-pursuit/pension-liability-s... (PolicyEd: Interactive Map of Pension Liability by State and City) Illinois is an outlier, and is seriously in trouble, but most other states will be fine.

Total pension liability (from your numbers): 133.5 billion There are 12.80 million people in Illinois, so the per-person liability is $10429 A typical pension is paid out over the course of about 20 years. The liability per person per year is $521 Put differently: the pension liability per year is 6.675 billion. Illinois rakes in about $45 billion per year in taxes. That's at most "awkward" to handle and at best "eas…

Surely not. Being 15% underwater on bills is not easy to recover from. That $45 billion is already used up. You can't just get 7 billion of it every year back. That's humongous!

And because the underfundedness compounds (if you have less capital, then you fall farther behind because your growth is on your capital being as projected), they're in real trouble.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#126

Post by andy_ppp »

pitaj wrote: post #124
andy_ppp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The annoying thing is it’s 5 lines of css to fix in most browsers... https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/make-pre-text-wrap/

Yes except that breaks actual code, especially affecting mobile devices where wrapping can make it very difficult to follow.

It doesn’t actually break code, it just wraps it on mobile devices differently. Make your window bigger (80 chars) if you want to see full lines. For mobile it’s still more readable than horizontal scrolling code.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#127

Post by bmm6o »

jdhn wrote: post #41
Accujack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closing the loophole in the law that lets them treat workers as "contractors" rather than employees is going to torpedo their whole business model.

I'm not sure why people think that drivers for Uber & Lyft shouldn't be treated as "contractors". I know I'm in the minority on this, but to me it seems that you can jump in and out of employment with Uber & Lyft quite easily, to the point that it does seem more like contract work. As an anecdote, I took a Lyft to the airport with someone who had stopped driving for 6 months in order to get started with a new full ti…

> but to me it seems that you can jump in and out of employment with Uber & Lyft quite easily, to the point that it does seem more like contract work

You can't really look at one aspect of it and make a determination, it's based on several factors. The main ones that come up in this scenario are if the contractor/employee can set their own rates, and how closely management monitors how they do their job. Flexibility of employment - either in terms of scheduling or to take periods of time off - is not considered.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#128

Post by pitaj »

andy_ppp wrote: post #126
pitaj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes except that breaks actual code, especially affecting mobile devices where wrapping can make it very difficult to follow.

It doesn’t actually break code, it just wraps it on mobile devices differently. Make your window bigger (80 chars) if you want to see full lines. For mobile it’s still more readable than horizontal scrolling code.

> It doesn’t actually break code, it just wraps it on mobile devices differently.

I meant it breaks the flow of the code by inserting line breaks.

> Make your window bigger (80 chars) if you want to see full lines. For mobile it’s still more readable than horizontal scrolling code.

Not all code uses 80 as the standard, many use 100 instead. Regardless, it is not at all true that wrapping is more readable than horizontal scrolling. Wrapping doesn't obey the indentation of the surrounding context.

Re: Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey

#130

Post by dang »

pitaj wrote: post #53

Please don't quote with code blocks. It breaks formatting by forcing horizontal scrolling, and is especially bad on mobile. Requoted: > Employee and employer state Unemployment Insurance tax rates will apply to the first $34,400 of an employee’s earnings in 2019 (up from $33,700 in 2018). For 2019, employees are subject to a 0.0425% (.000425) Workforce Development Partnership Fund tax rate. The employee Unemployment…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539377 and marked it off-topic.
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