Selective Taxing: Charging the Public for Censorship

I am a Democrat. If there were any party left of the Democratic that was actually taken seriously in the United States (say a strong Socialist Party), I would cease to be a Democrat and align myself with the more liberal party. But for now, I am a Democrat, which doesn´t mean that I agree with everything that every Democrat does. For example, Senator Zell Miller is supposedly a Democrat, yet he dislikes Kerry and supported Bush in the 2004 election. OH Zell, NO! However, that is somewhat old news. More recently, I have decided to disagree with Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and all of the Democratic senators that are sponsoring her bill, the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005, that would impose a 25% tax on the revenue of most adult-themed websites (a.k.a porn sites).

Lincoln claims that this new law would "keep products unsuitable for children from view," and keep pornographers from "pushing those products in children´s faces." Now, I am no pornographer, but I am not aware of any porn website or company specifically targeting children.

Do I think children should be allowed to look at porn? Of course not, what do you think I am, a perv? But I do think that it is a parent´s responsibility and not the government´s to keep their kids from looking at such things. If protection is the issue here, why don´t we tax action and horror movies and violent video games at this arbitrary 25% rate? I´d rather my child see two people having sex than a person being disembowled. Hell, let´s tax the evening news, all the news we´re getting from Iraq can be really traumatizing to small children. It seems to me like sex is a little more natural than decapitation and torture.

How the hell is taxing porn going to keep it from reaching children anyway? All it´s going to do is make poor, hardup Joe Schmoe fork over a little more cash to get his nightly kicks, because whatever the pornographer has to pay is just going to get pushed onto the consumer. And the consumer is taxed heavily enough as it is. Maybe when my tax dollars start supporting education, head start and the environment instead of that quagmire in Iraq, I´ll support legislation that ups tax rates.

The good part is that legal scholars are saying that the bill doesn´t stand a chance. "The general principle is that if you can´t ban a certain category of expression, they you cannot selectively impose tax on it," says Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University. "If it were constitutional to tax a disfavored category of speaker, then there would be 99% taxes on pornography and hate speakers and Howard Stern... But the courts understand that the power to tax ultimately is the power to destroy."

Oh dear, so not only would it appear that this is just a way of getting more money out of us, but the bill may also be considered censorship. Well, if it´s argued that way, the scholars are probably right, this bill is just a waste of Congress and the Democratic party´s time. There are certainly more pressing issues in this nation that would better benefit from Senator Lincoln, Carper (Delaware), Pryor (Arkansas), Landrieu (Louisiana), Lieberman (Connecticut), Salazar (Colorado), Stabenow (Michigan), Bayh(Indiana) and Conrad´s (N. Dakota) time.


Source: "Senators seek Web porn tax," www.news.com, Aug. 1, 2005