Japan To Tax Online Sales Of Foreign-Made Content 59
Qedward writes with this except from CIO. "Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015. Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically. Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods. The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning."
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the harder I work, the more money they want
No, that's not true. An income tax taxes you based on how much you made; whether you worked hard or not in order to make it isn't a factor. In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes.
then tax me again when I ... give it to my children as inheritance when I die
Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous. It's not such a big deal when you leave some modest bank accounts or some furniture or something, but it's not good to have people inherit vast estates merely due to the accident of their birth.
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Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous...
Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.
Citation? Or are these just your opinions based on YOUR interpretation of "fairness"?
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No, they're widespread opinions. Laws usually come about because people think they're good ideas; why would legislators work to enact laws that everyone except for me was opposed to?
People who inherit wealth didn't work for it, and didn't earn it. Some heirs might be in a desperate way, and it isn't bad to help them get on their feet. Others might inherit items of significant sentimental value but which aren't fabulously valuable and that's not so bad either.
But there is no gain to society for a select few
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Yeah, but look at one of those jobs, for example. Let's say that person is working 8 hours per day. They pay a certain amount of tax. Now compare that to cases where their hours are cut to 4 hours per day, or expanded to 12 hours per day. Even without progressive tax tables (imagine a flat tax rate), notice how the taxes go up or down. Then imagine the real world, where there are prog
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Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax.
Not really. If that were the case, then the tax would differ between two jobs of differing hardness but equal pay. But it doesn't. Likewise, if we double or halve the amount of work done at a job, and thus the hardness of the job, but don't change the amount of pay, the taxes remain constant while the hardness varies.
What you're really identifying is that if someone's work hours are doubled or halved, this typically comes hand in hand with a doubling or halving of their pay, which is the actual factor that
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vending machine product prices will change, ill be looking for a riot to join.
Why would they need foreign content? (Score:2)
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Ummm ... it's right there in the summary:
Or, are you somehow suggesting "Slashdot should be enough for anybody"?
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Ummm ... it's right there in the summary:
Or, are you somehow suggesting "Slashdot should be enough for anybody"?
Bingo. To be more precise, I was hinting that /. is cheap enough for everybody (as in "a great way of killing time and getting nothing in return". You don't believe me? Read this thread again)
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Same as most other governments do, make the onus of reporting on you, and failure to report illegal.
Re:It will never work (Score:5, Informative)
Same as most other governments do, make the onus of reporting on you, and failure to report illegal.
No, they'll do as Europe does. Foreign websites that sell to European customers digital goods automatically add VAT in what you pay. The end user has no reporting to do. It is all automatic.
Omly the US had a fucked up volontary system for reporting due taxes.
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"Omly the US had a fucked up volontary system for reporting due taxes."
That "fucked up volontary system" is due to the way our country is structured.
States cannot tax transactions that happen in other States. That's because each State is sovereign. So States impose a "use" tax (which actually is not "voluntary") on the use of the item within the State. Because it is not a tax on the transaction, and only involves inside-State use, it is a legal tax.
The Federal government, likewise, has no authority to tax on behalf of States.
That's the way our country is designed. Tha
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For example, let's say there's normally 3 taxing locales for sake of argument.
Part of the problem is that there aren't. There are something like 13,000 different taxing districts in the U.S., each with their own tax rate and regulations.
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How the hell are they going to police that?
They don't need to perfectly police it. The largest 10% of vendors sell 90% of the goods. As long as you collect from Amazon, iTunes, GooglePlay, and so on, you will get all the revenue.
The funny part is that this actually gives a competitive advantage to small stores to little to notice. Until they become big enough to be noticed...
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well.. they make apple and amazon do it for them - or face potential blocking.
paying VAT on such buys is the norm in eu pretty much already.
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The same way that the police it in Europe. The money is paid using local credit cards, so they can get the money off the bank before it reaches them if needs be.
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You do realize there's an amazon.co.jp, right?
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Well, Japan *does* still manufacture stuff, unlike the U.S. Maybe forcing people to buy locally isn't an unwanted outcome.
The U.S., to my knowledge, is the only country that kowtows to the corporate to the degree that they don't even try to promote local manufacturing anymore. There is nothing wrong with protecting your country and its livelihood... it's one of the things governments are SUPPOSED to do.
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What year in the U.S. has the most value of manufactured goods?
Manufacturing jobs have no bearing on amount of manufacturing.
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Senator Smoot? Representative Hawley? Is that you?
It would be nice if someone learned a lesson from the last time countries started trying to protect local industries from competition, but the evidence is that they haven't....
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And at the same time, they're paying good money to their workers in Japan.
Are you sure you want to stick with your hypothesis?
And how will they impose this tax? (Score:5, Informative)
So I'm sure what the Japanese people are doing, as an example, is switching their iTunes "home" location to another country and buying iTunes cards from those countries, saving costs and getting equivalent merchandise.
This scheme does not make for easy tracking and taxation on the Japanese side...
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Or the Japanese government could just stop spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave with terminal cancer.
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So I'm sure what the Japanese people are doing, as an example, is switching their iTunes "home" location to another country and buying iTunes cards from those countries, saving costs and getting equivalent merchandise.
That's exactly what they're doing, or they're having their friends in the US and Canada send the stuff to them. I regularly send movies, cards, and games to my gaming buddies in Japan, because I can get it much cheaper...and surprise I have no qualms about it, neither do they. They're getting raked over the coals, but it has all to do with amount or lack of taxation they're able to raise because the average worker age is now 41(unlike the late 20's to early 30's in the Americas). Then again, I would have
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The way it works in Denmark, and I imagine other EU countries, is that companies with a revenue from Danish customers above a certain threshold (250,000 EUR/year I think) must register with the Danish tax authorities and collect the 25% VAT from Danish consumers in the same way as Danish companies do (the VAT threshold for Danish companies is about 6700 EUR/year). So it's the responsibility of the company to do the tracking and taxation.
If you fail to do that as a company, I'm not sure exactly what happens,
Bitcoin could be a problem here (Score:4, Interesting)
What if a seller (legal in it's own country) sells mp3's/videos through a website that allows worldwide customers and takes Bitcoin for it. The seller never registers with the government of Japan. The buyer avoids the tax, the seller saves credit card fees and chargebacks. Only the government of Japan looses.
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well, if amazon starts taking bitcoin, it will take the vat off from that transaction.
i guess the thing in your comment is "the seller never registers with the government of japan".
but the transaction to buy the bitcoins on your japanese credit card would still point to something.. making you to pay tax on the bitcoins the very least.
We should (Score:2)
Ouch (Score:2)
I know enough Japanese people to know that a lot of western media is very difficult to come by in Japan via conventional mediums. You'd be surprised at the number of videogames, movies and the likes that are commonplace in the US, Europe, etc, but not in Japan.
Companies like Capcom and Square Enix actually localize some western games in there, with usually tacky, poorly translated scripts, bottom-of-the-barrel voice acting (if any) and overly inflated prices. Most videogame players that like western-style s
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