Even as Mary Bono Mack and Republicans fiddle with the pointless SAFE Data act that won’t actually do anything to prevent or even to deter online crime, the Internet burns with a string of further attacks. The Senate was hit twice, and the CIA was hit as well.
I thought we were the party that likes to solve crime by putting the criminals in jail? Why don’t we drop this reporting theater and get back to catching criminals blackmailing the US government and private enterprise?
Seriously? We want to jail kids who upload music to YouTube, and create a Communist China-style Internet censorship blacklist, but we’re blaming the victims of online attacks?
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Don’t our elected officials have access to Ballotpedia? If the California Democrats did, they’d know that the Amazon Tax being taken up this afternoon in the legislature is unconstitutional under the state Constitution. And it’s not some old, obscure provision that’s violated either. It’s the brand-new Proposition 26, a constitutional amendment passed in November, that the tax violates.
Put simply, Proposition 26 doesn’t let the state raise new revenue without a 2/3 requirement, so the Amazon tax cannot be passed with a simple majority. And no, Proposition 25, another constitutional amendment also passed in November, doesn’t change that fact.
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State governments are timid beasts. So often the country will refuse to move in a new policy direction unless one state jumps out ahead and acts first. In the past, California was often the dynamic frontrunner. Now, Texas is increasingly the example that other states ought to follow.
When it comes to the Amazon Tax, or the plan to change the tax laws in Texas to punish Amazon for out-competing its competitors, it looked like Texas was ready to lead in the the right direction. Governor Rick Perry vetoed HB 2403, the initial attempt at passing a special Amazon Tax in the state.
But the forces of tax-and-spend politics haven’t given up yet. Even as Texas celebrates its first all-funds spending reduction in decades, it seems like some people haven’t given up on raising taxes. So, the Amazon tax was re-inserted into SB 1 in the special session.
No matter what bill it’s in, a special Internet Sales Tax is a bad idea, and takes Texas in the wrong direction.
Conservative think tanks and activist groups are aligning against the proposal. However the sneaky bit about this second attempt at the new tax is that Governor Perry does not have a line item veto. So it’s time to put pressure on the legislature to fix SB 1 for smaller, Constitutional government.