Dow Jones Sues Texas; Says Taxing The Wall Street Journal Is A First Amendment Violation
from the tax-the-ink dept
Apparently Texas has a bizarre tax law, in which newspapers don't have to pay sales tax, but where newspapers are very specifically defined as "being printed on newsprint, distributed in short intervals, disseminating the news, with an average sale price that doesn't exceed $1.50." Having that price point in there seems like a really strange static number. Of course, due to inflation, the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times have both increased their cover price such that they're over an average of $1.50, and the state government, so desperate for tax money, declared that both newspapers are no longer newspapers, and must now pay sales tax. Dow Jones paid the tax, but is now suing the state, claiming that the tax code represents a First Amendment violation.While this may sound silly, there is a pretty strong basis for the lawsuit. There have been a few Supreme Court cases that cover similar grounds, including Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Comm'r which found that a tax on ink for newspapers was prior restraint and a violation of the First Amendment and Grosjean v. American Press Co., Inc., where the Court found that a tax on newspapers that had a circulation of 20,000 was similarly a restraint on the First Amendment. It seems like the Texas tax is pretty similar to both of those situations...
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Filed Under: free speech, newspapers, prior restraint, texas, wall street journal
Companies: dow jones
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I guess in this category it is a matter of treating one newspaper different from another, but why treat newspapers different than magazines, periodicals or even books and documentaries? After all a sales tax on those is a violation of the authors/producers' rights to free speech.
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Re: Taxes!
taxes are just plain wrong and should be abolished.
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Re: Re: Taxes!
Taxes are not "plain wrong" ,nor should they be abolished.
Perhaps you feel that your personal share of taxes is too high or that you feel that high taxes drive away businesses, which (ignoring either point's validity) are at least some kind of talking points about policy.
Try to actually add to discussions, not just rhetorical comments that have no real basis in any real discussion about a topic. K. Thanks :)
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Re: Re: Re: Taxes!
I take it you're implying that taxes are the only way to have those?
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Which is not a GOP POV. I gave possible alternative stances which would actually be beneficial to the discussion, such as "My personal share of taxes are too high" or "High taxes drive away businesses". These arguments at least could contribute to a discussion about tax policy. Just saying they are "just plain wrong" is the GOP-Faux-News-astro-turf-Koch-brothers-tea-party point of view.
And wanting someone to give a more well thought out argument than "taxes are evil" isn't "GOP Newspeak", it is being tired of people not being involved in the running of their government and only spouting off catch phrases that fit on bumper stickers.
Plus... You got it backwards... if you are going to insult someone, at least understand which angle they are talking from. You should have called me a "Marxist Socialist Commie" instead. lol
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so whereas you would expect sales to persist for a book over a long time with popularity of the subject, a printed newspaper edition is not going to sell past the next edition which can be as frequent as the next day or the next week.
I am not defending the lack of seeming tax fairness here, just highlighting a possible reason for the distinction as a newspaper is far more likely to publish information that the public needs to know right now and taxing the publication might reduce the number of copies available to said public. This in turn might have the effect of leaving some uninformed; especially those in lower income brackets.
Now in the age of the Internet and the plethora of alternative sources for the type of information traditionally served by newspapers, there is room for argument here that perhaps the distinction need no longer apply.
It will be interesting to see where this goes however and what the consequences would be for allowing taxation of newspapers going forward. One question remains here though: If the tax reduces the number of physical copies of the paper available to the public, does this mean that the State could go after pay wall revenues in the same way - or do they already do this?
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This reminds me of the time the GOP denied climate change
Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.
However, I won’t rise physically, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating around the room.
I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Instead, we will embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.
This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrödinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!
Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.
And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.
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Re: This reminds me of the time the GOP denied climate change
It looks to me like the GOP denied that climate change was due to mankind's pollution.
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Fair and equal taxation.
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What about the 2nd amendment?
Very interesting. Taxing ink is prior restraint. So taxing ammo should be considered prior restraint of the 2nd amendment too by that logic. Yet guns and ammo are heavily taxed and if the anti-gunners had their way, would be taxed even more heavily. Seems the NRA should take this to court.
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