President Clinton Argues For National Web Consumption Tax

President Clinton has called for a national web consumption tax. This is rather ironic since he originally signed legislation to keep the web tax free. 

How times change. I’ll start off by saying I was and am a supporter of Bill Clinton. Yes, he certainly has his personal faults, but it was also nice to have a President whose eyes didn’t glaze over when a complex economic issue was raised. Alas, Clinton has now stepped into the internet sales tax issue and did so before a potentially hostile audience.

President Clinton was speaking before ICANN, the group that controls the distribution of domain names across the web. His argument was an interesting one and one, frankly, that will probably result in the final solution that he came up with. 

Clinton’s basic point was he signed the Internet Freedom Tax Act of 1998 because the web was in its infancy as a commercial frontier. Given this, it made sense to give it a leg up much like the government does in many areas including, for instance, tax credit for hybrid cars. The situation, however, has changed dramatically since 1998. Companies that were struggling to get off the ground, like Amazon.com, are now huge and arguably putting an end to small retailers in the brick and mortar world. This is plainly the truth. 

Clinton did not call for any specific tax. He simply suggested that online sites doing more than a certain amount in sales should be required to pay something. The internet is no longer in its infancy. It is maturing quickly and the major players online are dominant in their fields. Creating a consumption tax for them is, according to Clinton, hardly a burden. 

So, what should we make of this? Well, you can like it or not. The truth is we are going to see a national consumption tax sooner or later. The key will be what it looks like and how it is implemented.

Oh, joy! Another tax.