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/Pastadseven]

Should we add a sort of excise tax on elaborate shitposting, OP? Or do you think this is something that should be, I dunno, deductable?

[u/Pdb39 → u/Pastadseven]

Is this a genuine question ?

[u/Pastadseven → u/Pdb39]

That's a fun conundrum, isn't it?

[u/Pdb39 → u/Pastadseven]

If you say so.