Imagine you’re in Texas and really excited to pick up Grand Theft Auto. Doesn’t matter which one. You’ve saved up your lunch money for months, but something is wrong - the price is much higher thanks to a new tax law. 50% higher, in fact! This is the future Star Locke, gubernatorial candidate in the state of Texas, envisions.
Locke, according to The Amarillo Globe News, wants “to do away with property taxes statewide” while taxing “violent games” and a myriad of other things (i.e. abortions and soft drinks) a whopping 50%. He sees these taxes as “the power to destroy. So our concept is that we need to tax things we don’t want and you want to not tax things you want to encourage.”
He stated that games would be deemed “violent” by a 10-member committee, and taxes would “be levied swiftly” against game publishers. While none of this is final, gamers of voting age in Texas who’d like to keep their games from being even more expensive have a chance to make their opinion heard during the state’s elections in March.[/quote]
His chances are pretty slim, he’ll be vying for the Republican nomination against Rick Perry, who was GWB’s Lieutentant Governor when GWB was still Governor. I don’t like Perry either, but the odds of Star Locke getting the bid over Perry are slim to none. Of course, I’ll be voting Democrat anyway.
The dude has a point, but thats a little outrageous. And soda??? That alone will kill him. I must say though, there are a lot of ppl that are starting to like ideas like this all over the nation though. Taxing the little niche stuff has appeal to a lot of ppl, and in high amounts. there is major talk of doing this to alcohol and tobacco in several states i know right now. and a few other things are on that list too.
Lol, you know though, if we did that, we’d have to import soda. I dont know interstate commerce things, but if we bought the soda in another state, and gave it away for free, we could get around that soda law…
you know also what something like that would cause. Massive DLing of games. Black market always wins in stuff like this. The vid game makers equal of RIAA would tell texas I bet to repeal the law. That or take them to court. now thers a lawsuit i would pay money to see.
This is a tactic commonly used through the “Sin Tax”, which is an additional taxation on alcohol and cigarettes that several states have created, most notably in New England where packs of cigarettes cost about $7.50.
But that sounds like maybe 15%, 50% is ridiculous. And Arac brings up a fun little point; taxation on video games and sodas but not firearms? How about Fast Food? Texas is the fattest state in the nation with something like 5 of the fattest cities in the country out of the top 15 or 20.
This is ridiculous. Surely if he was somehow elected this nonsense wouldn’t pass.
Games and Soda. Sin taxes? Okay, maybe, but this is primarily adolescent stuff. In other words, kids a little younger than most of us (and a lot younger than me) are going to be the ones providing this revenue.
And of course we all know how much money kids have.
Why do they continue to expect the poorest people to pay the most tax money? This “logic” is why the country at large is 80 gazillatrillion dollars in debt. Oh, and why we don’t have any money left to make our public schools stop sucking.
Not to mention individually taxing every single item individually would cause a great amount of trouble for retailers. Massive reprogramming of cash register systems would be required just for those few products. Taxing pop extra would kill convenience stores, where their cash registers are just basically fancy adding machines with a cash tray. They’d have no way of specifying the extra tax on the specific item.
I hope you are sarcastic.
Guns don’t kill either…
Neither does soda or videogames.
Although they all can help destruction of self and/or others, they are not the one and only cause…:hint:
EDIT : What I am saying is that people will not always make a choice based on health and lifestyle.
Which leads me to say this, the Governor Hopeful obviously does not know how to make people responsible…
A 50% tax on anything is totally unfeasible, and even if he did it, it would be wildly unpopular. Though, that would require he actually get rid of property tax, which isn’t the smartest tax to remove. And beside, he’d have to contend with the lobbies of the companies he’s hurting by doing this, and i doubt a freshman governor who was a relative unknown wants to do that.
People like this just want attention, and by giving it to him, you only encourage these kind of idiots.
Maybe this guy is trying to get all the over protective mothers in Texas to vote for him. There are alot more of them than you think.