Chicago Wants To Double-Collect Taxes On Event Ticket Sales
from the pay-more-taxes dept
eBay subsidiary StubHub seems like a pretty straightforward concept: it's a marketplace for event ticket resales. It's a huge market, and it makes sense to have a platform for people to resell tickets they've legally bought. However, StubHub seems to keep getting attacked and finding itself in court. First there was Ticketmaster, which complained that StubHub was violating Ticketmaster's "exclusive" rights to selling tickets to certain venues. Then there was the New England Patriots who demanded the names of whoever sold tickets through StubHub in order to punish the ticketholders. Now, the city of Chicago is suing eBay and StubHub, claiming that it needs to collect a special city "amusement tax" on each ticket sold. This is a pure money grab. The original ticket buyer already paid that tax -- and even if you accept the idea that resales should also be taxed (which is pretty questionable), then it seems like something that the actual seller should be responsible for, rather than StubHub/eBay itself. But, don't tell that to Chicago politicians who see this as an easy way to hit up a big company for millions of dollars. If this sounds similar to the attempts to suddenly get Amazon to pay up in other states, that's because it is. Seems like local governments are looking for any way to squeeze companies for extra tax dollars, no matter how little sense it actually makes.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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greed
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Nothing out of the ordinary...
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Re:
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Two Things
Nobody here is saying that buying tickets Purposely to resell them is an entrepreneur. I would still call them parasites and I still dislike them. However, that is no reason to add a tax to them. Adding a tax after the right of first sale will have many unintended consequences. There is the right of first sale where they have a chance to collect tax from this, and that should be the only place we allow the government to tax.
If the city wants a money grab, why not charge the oil companies. They have billions of dollars ... each .. every single quarter.
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Tax
So what's next, tax on items sold at a garage sale? Why not? We have to pay tax on things bought at Goodwill, don't we?
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excessive fees/taxes
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Read the article here
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Re:
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Use an auction instead
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I haven't bought tickets to a game or a concert in probably 15 years - and most likely will not ever again. I like going - but they are just far too expensive now.
So they can keep the tickets and I'll keep the money I would have paid in taxes.
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Regardless of price to not have bought tickets to something in 15 years is a bit extreme.
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Amusement Tax?
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resale
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Every city does this
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on the bright side . . .
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Just tax consumption
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