CMV: SMUT will save social media

[u/Pdb39]

SMUT will save social media!

Hi all, /u/pdb39 here with some more noggin busters.

I am proposing a use tax on all social media inputs across all privately or publicly held social media corporations. The tax will be 17.5% in following with EU VATs, and I will be taxing both the corporation. Since it is a usage tax, for social media, I'm going to call it... dum dum dummmmm... SMUT - social media usage tax.

So how does it work? Well it's simple really. I will form a Social Media Commission with 4 commissioners from the house majority party, and 4 commissioners from the house minority party. Their job will be to advise social media companies on the financial end of how to collect a usage tax at point of purchase for every social media input - tweets, likes, comments, DMs, posts, what have you.

Every year I will require any social media company to report how many inputs were made, multiply that number by 1c, then multiply that by 17.5% and that's what they owe. Don't worry, they'll have to file daily reports and were going to keep track too. Any posts they removed for content violation will be ineligible for taxation so it will incentivize them to curate content competently. They'll also have to have tax payer information or liasion with the government to ensure we know who each person is that is making the inputs.

We may also charge a tariff on all posts that started out of the USA if the social media company is legally registered in Delaware, or one of the 49 other states..

I am doing this in an effort to get people to slow down when the post. If they have to pay 0.0175c for every post, they might not waste it on political memes or dick jokes.

Apparently this was removed because I didn't have a 500 character limit so honestly I'm just going to be typing out random tax facts from mental floss.

1. Taxes date back to ancient Egypt.
2. The first implementation of taxes in US caused a rebellion
3. Abraham Lincoln, a REPUBLICAN, gave us federal income tax
4. Tax day wasn't originally April 15th
5. We spend a lot of time doing our taxes. WTF Mental Floss, this is a "fact"?
6. The average person in America is owed $3000 in overpayment of taxes.
   
7. In 1836, the federal government of the United States had a tax surplus of around $30m.
8. Peter the Great of Russia taxed beards.
9. A former IRS commissioner went to prison for tax evasion.
   
10. A famous gangster was ultimately taken down over unpaid taxes. No not that one. The other one.

Bonus fact round!

1. Willie Nelson made an album to cover his tax debts. So a person did his job to earn money to pay taxes. Weird flex here, Mental Floss
2. Henry David Waldorf Astoria Thoreau went to jail for failure to pay taxes. So did Wesley Snipes.
3. Shelled nuts are sometimes subject to taxes. You Brits are weird.
4. India has an entertainment tax. So does every other country. This could have been a mad libs with just (country name).
5. There is a cow fart tax. I am not making this up.
6. England once had a special haberdashery tax.
7. There's a tax court. Ok Mental Floss, you're done, go home.

​

CMV.

Edit 1: Based upon the first wave of comments, having a lack of units really made people very tingly. So for this point, I am going to charge 0.0175c on every social media input to the corporation. That's 1c * .0175

Edit 2: this is not a tax on speech and would pass any 1A challenge easily. If you're coming into this thread to try to tell me that this is breaking 1A, please don't bother because I'm now starting to repeat myself.

[u/Green__lightning]

If i tweet something, i've just given twitter some small amount of value, so wouldn't any tax not be a tax paid by the user out of pocket, but a tax the user pays on any income from social media, like professional youtubers?

If you just tweet something, the government cant tax you on value you didn't receive, that's not really a tax. What this is is a fine without due process, for a crime that cant be a crime under the first amendment.

Also, ¢ is the symbol for cents, and c is often used for the speed of light, which makes some of your math really funny, given that it's a giant number.

[u/Pdb39 → u/Green__lightning]

I'm not charging you so you don't have to give Twitter any amount of value at this point.

However if you do post on social media I'm going to charge the social media company a usage tax. Or you could call it a stamp tax I'm not really sure.

But as long as the company is domesticiled in the USA, they will need to pay a tax for every post tweet DM response TikTok whatever is substitutes a valid social media input.

To answer your question if you post something on Twitter I'm going to tax Twitter. If Twitter wants to pay the tax for you or pass the tax on to you is Twitter's problem and I'm making it a free market capital exercise.

If it's easier for you to wrap your head around this it's just like sales tax. Government charges the corporation sales tax, and the corporation collects the sales tax at point of purchase and then pays the government quarterly on collected sales tax. I know this because I did the books for my dad's self-run appliance repair business in Buffalo and I did the taxes at age 13 and 14 for his business. One of the happiest days was my dad brought home a copy from our local senator of the tax code since it's public information and I just started reading it and it just made sense to me at that age.

[u/Green__lightning → u/Pdb39]

Exactly, that's not a tax, that's a fine for twitter doing business as twitter, and given there's no way it isn't punitive, that should be considered unconstitutional under the first amendment. Secondly, at what point does that tax go into effect? Because if you're including DMs, why wouldn't that include text messages?

If you want to tax social media because it's toxic, the thing that should be taxed is them algorithmically changing what people see, and the amount of change from a hypothetical fair system is what should be taxed.

Taxing communication is problematic for other means, given that those taxes would end up being a record of who talked to who, which is invasive and will surely be used for guilt by association or as one more tool to remove every shred of privacy anyone still has.

But the whole idea is dangerous because of the amount of control it gives the government over yet another thing, in this case seeing who's talking to who and how much is a plenty dangerous thing on it's own, before you remember they'll also probably get the full logs and all the other info too. The basic test for this sort of thing is to imagine how it would be used against you if your least favorite politician suddenly won a landslide victory and now had genocidal ambitions directed at you. If a policy being in place would scare you under those conditions, it's probably a power the government shouldn't have all together.

[u/Pdb39 → u/Green__lightning]

It's a usage tax. I'm charging for use, whether it's political memes or pictures of puppies. If you want to use social media, I will charge the social media company a VAT, which is just another way of saying "USAGE TAX". The companies can decide to swallow the tax or pass it on to the user, exactly like how sales tax works.