City of Philadelphia to impose ‘blog tax’ on bloggers
In Philadelphia, Mayor Micheal Nutter intends to impose a Business Privilege Tax upon anybody that produces an income through means of advertising online. Exactly what this means is bloggers and free-lance authors will be slammed with a $300 ‘tax’ whether or not your website or blog has made any profit!
Philly has denied generating a tax specifically on bloggers, rather as explained previously what they are working on is drawing from the Business Privilege Tax and classifying blogs and websites as a “business” mainly because of advertising income (no matter how tiny the income might end up being).
As you could just imagine, this “blog tax” has put a bad taste in the mouths of writers and bloggers who happen to reside in Philadelphia. This has additionally started debate over the web for bloggers that do not actually live in the city. Performing a Google search for the keyword “Philadelphia Tax Blog” under the Blog option query turns up over 200,000 posts dedicated to the topic.
Freelance authors experienced a similar issue several years back and are required to pay the Business Privilege Tax if they wish to write and be paid for it. Bloggers may possibly end up heading down the exact same road. The Business Tax would likely be $300 for a life time ‘privilege’ as compared to $50 a year for a ‘limited privilege’. This would be in addition to the regular federal government and state tax levies which will be imposed towards any kind of net earnings.
My Take: We’ll see how this pans out but it looks pretty obvious that Philly is searching for any way they can to generate more revenue. I think it would be hard for the city impose this tax on every blog/website in the city…even the ones that do not generate income. But the ones that merely have ads on them (even if they make close to zero $$…which are many) would be squarely in the crosshairs.
No related posts.
Category: Blogging
About the Author (Author Profile)
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
I don’t think they’ll have a hard time pushing this through. They’re going to simply say ‘hey, it’s a business so you have to pay the man like everyone else.’ Like you said, any site that has any ads (even affiliate ads) are going to get hit.