After a month of unproductive political theater, Virginia’s leaders will finally sit down like adults and negotiate the budget. Better late than never. The message is “everything is back on the table,” which leaves the door wide open for the tax increase central to the Democrat’s demands. That deserves a quick no.
At this point, Virginians do not pay sales tax on their Netflix, Disney, or sports streaming package subscriptions. That is what they want to tax now. If you just paid an online vendor to file a tax return, next year a sales tax of up to 6 or 7% will be added to that bill. Likewise, any annual subscription for Microsoft Office or One Drive storage, or for an internet security system, will be taxed.
Substack will be taxed. Some online news and opinion streaming options will probably be protected by the exemption for newspapers, but others will not. That will be a fun dispute for the Tax Department to broker, one of many new rules to work out.
Did you pay to play that new movie on Amazon using bill credits you had built up? Will tax be added to that, as well? Or will the entire Prime membership trigger a tax? The whole idea is rife with questions and unintended consequences, even more so for the application of the tax to digital goods and services in the business realm. Taxing business purchases produces the big revenue. Continue reading