101–110 of 185 posts
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Consumers never buy anything from Stripe or Square. Consumer buy ride services from Uber.
So Etsy should be charging GST and every other marketplace app out there. Uber is a broker not a transportation company. Other than their self driving experiments, they don't operate a single car.
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In my experience, whenever Uber is surging enough to make cabs cheaper (2.5x in my city), there are no cabs to be found. That or the cabs try to scam you by asking for extra cash off meter (happened to me on New Year's Eve).
It's interesting that you call Uber 'surging' but cabbies doing the same 'scamming'. I understand what you're saying but they are quite comparable..
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I used to work for Landstar[0], which operates in a very similar way to Uber, but in the trucking industry. The company has been around for almost 30 years and the drivers are considered Owner-Operators[1] (i.e. contractors). I was under the impression that an Uber driver could choose not to take any given fare(just like our truckers could). There seems to be some irrationality when it comes to Uber among my fellow e…
Imo the contractor designation should be limited to people who have pricing power for their work. Uber drivers have none.
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Does the safety somehow diminish when you pay for the ride? If I give you a ride to work, for free --- then give you a ride to work, but you pay me, what is the functional difference requiring more regulation on the second part? Is your safety affected any different? Aside from the basic protections built in to any business when it comes to collecting money, etc, what extra rules need to be in place. From a purely pr…
Yes. In the ride business, speed = money. Bad incentive.
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Consumers never buy anything from Stripe or Square. Consumer buy ride services from Uber.
So Etsy should be charging GST and every other marketplace app out there. Uber is a broker not a transportation company. Other than their self driving experiments, they don't operate a single car.
If Uber switches to (self driving) cars that Uber owns itself, how does that change the sales tax model? The product is still essentially the same, the consumer still pays Uber, tax shouldn't change here. The backend shouldn't dictate whether sales tax is applicable here.
Etsy is a general marketplace and should handle sales tax/GST just like Amazon does. Which it does.
All of this Uber/Lyft stuff has me wondering... Instead of making it harder to be an Uber/Lyft to match Taxis, why not make it easier to be a taxi? Driving someone around shouldn't be so complicated. Regulation, when necessary, is good... but most of what I see around taxi regulation is just money gouging on the part of the state.
>Driving someone around shouldn't be so complicated. Until someone gets driven 60 miles out of town on the way to the airport and left there unless they have a "special" fee... It's almost as if these regulations were put in place for a reason.
Taking someone somewhere against their will is already illegal, which of these extra laws (and taxes) prevent that?
The result would be the same in either case - the driver would be held accountable for, basically, kidnapping and extortion, and you'll be left either short more money or stranded 60 miles out of town. A regulation in place isnt going to prevent someone from doing that. Regulations would have no impact on that case.
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They brought everything they could. I'm not criticizing them for that. Taxi companies didn't even have apps 5-10 years ago. But a ton of what they have been doing obviously goes against the spirit of the laws they're leveraging. The GST loophole is a perfect example. It's meant to allow tiny businesses to avoid the paperwork and overhead associated with collecting GST. But Uber would be doing all that overhead for th…
I'm still not sure how that's considered a loophole. The people who work for them are in fact small business operators, and it most certainly does simplify the process for them not having to pay for GST. Is your argument that you wish they had structured it differently so they were forced to pay more taxes? If that was the case then the drivers would be making a less, and the passengers would pay a more to cover the…
The government is doing exactly the right thing in changing the law so that irrelevant differences in corporate structure don't affect the tax paid.
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Where I live, Uber charges less than half of what cab companies charge. But there are other ancillary benefits. Uber could be at parity with the cab companies but I would still prefer it because of: 1) Their app 2) The reliability of getting car with them vs. waiting for a cab. 3) Their vehicles are much, much, much nicer than cabs in my area. 4) The purchase experience.
Where I live, Uber charges less than half of what cab companies charge. Have you ever asked yourself how they do that? It's not like taxi drivers are fabulously wealthy.
Like you said, cab drivers (and probably cab company owners) aren't exactly fatcats. Meanwhile what's Travis Kalanick's net worth? How much are they paying top engineers at Uber?
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely corruption and protectionism in the existing taxi industry, but I fail to see how the low $5-7 fares are anywhere near sustainable. Is the revenue from surge pricing enough to offset the current discount?
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Fine, so knowing this, Uber collects GST and reduces the fare by the offsetting amount. In one pocket and out of the other. It's purely optics.
Except for the fact that the GST gets remitted to the government, instead of to Uber. Your suggesting is an 5-17% reduction in margin, dependent on province. Either way, collecting GST on a sale is the norm in Canada, regardless of what happens on the back end.
> So from what I can see, Uber should be collecting, for itself.
My comment is not about remitting, it's about collection. Jesus.
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Uber drivers are not employees. They are independent contractors. Uber, as part of their service, collects money from riders, giving both the rider and the driver a comfort factor as they don't have to deal with cash. As "hobby" businesses they each individually were enjoying the exemption. Now they will not - because we can't have "hobby" businesses causing discomfort to the well connected.
If it quacks like a duck, it gets taxed like a duck. Uber has made a business out of exploiting legal loopholes. They know it, their users know it, the politicians know it. It's just been a race to close them. I have no sympathy for Uber in this. They obviously provide a valuable service to people, so I'm sure they'll survive. Now they'll just be competing on an even playing field.
There are a certain number of criteria for employees vs contractors, based on whether training/equipment is provided, price setting, ability to turn down jobs, etc etc.
If you're classified as an employee, there are a bunch of things you have to do, such as collect GST, deal with health care, sick days, paternity leave, taxes, etc.
Uber is making the case that its drivers are contractors, since they set their own hours and purchase and maintain all their own equipment. It's a plausible argument, and that's something for the courts to sort out.
Just saying that they need to collect GST because the drivers are employees is begging the question.
If Uber drivers are classified as employees, what's next? Upwork and eLance workers classified as employees?