Sales and Property Tax

Rememeber Ghoti and Travis. You are already paying these taxes in the forum of Linden devaluation from created money. Having it sucked from your account in an itemized fashion rather than having it leak mysteriously in the form of a devalued Linden dollar wouldn't cost you any more. You would just just know where your money is going.

Like real taxes, you know how much go to federal, state, local, social security etc. Ulrika didn't propose an itemized tax bill. I just added the idea of having it itemized.

Taxes are ways in which a government extracts income from a nation.
LL is not a government and SL is not a nation, therefore a tax model is innapropriate.
LL is a corporation, selling goods and services (uploads, partnerships, groups) is more appropriate.

1. we do already pay taxes in the form of upload fees and premium subscriptions. LL just intelligently doesn't call them taxes. I don't think I'm too keen on formalizing income redistribution with such a scheme as ulrika proposes however.

2. aimee, I would guess that because the the itemized "here's how much you were diluted this month" number would be small, the majority would ignore it. It's not a major, painful dilution problem we have (yet), but it's still a valid ethical question. LL should not create L$ out of thin air every time they want something, or feel guilty about something.

But people are funny... maybe people will say "a few cents? who cares... i can ignore it" or maybe they'll say "I paid a 100th of a cent for that railroad station so-and-so built? hell NO!" I couldn't predict...

but I'm glad to see people finally catching on to this issue.

so we say, LL why do you make the community pay for all of LL's in-world costs? and LL might say, HEY! we're providing this service at a LOSS! and we'd say, yes, but you have equity in LL! and they'd say, but if we go outa business because we're spending all our RL$ cash on in-world content and reparations, then our equity is worthless and where would YOU be? and we'd say, ok, open your books so we can see the impact, and ginsu linden would say:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH

(although I wouldn't be surprised if some people actually do start demanding that LL opens their corporate financial books -- this is "our world!" right? your business belongs to ME! LOL) (let me then state that I am not one of those people)

Tier. Hello.

LOL.. everyone beat me to it.. I'll chime in anyway...

LL is a company not a government... governments tax, companies charge fees.

Land owners already pay a fee to own land.

Sales taxes will simply get passed on to the consumer. Just like in RL.

Reminds me of attaching a rider onto a bill in exchange for support in the Senate. Even though this reminds me of a political move, I still don't think of LL as a government. It's a business.

Yeah, ultimately the major suckage hits when I have to append +tax to all my signage and other marketing material that mentions the price. Nasty.

heh.

I do not really see devalued currency. I don't see items in world getting astronomically more expensive (are they? I sure didn't notice). My L$500 still seems to buy the same content it did before. In fact, it seems to me my L$500 is worth MORE now. It cost me less on LindeX and the items cost about the same.. yay for savings!

-Ghoti

No no guys, listen ... Philip said SL was a country!! OK good. Glad that's settled.



Well now, you wouldn't notice, would you? It's far too complex to calculate. Certainly the value of the Linden Dollar has dropped significantly against the USD but there is no way to tell how much of that drop is caused by Linden's creating money (I assume not much.)

All I am proposing is this ... Say the Telehub Buyback Program costs 100,000 lindens. Rather than create that money, just charge us all 1 Linden buck. The deduction can appear in our account history:

1L Deducted from your account to buy back telehub land.

Not a lot of money! No big deal! It's pretty much what they are already doing, only under this system the mystery would be gone.

I'm no math whiz - but is it really as simple as: if buying back TH land cost L$100,000 of printed money - that's a L$1 loss to each of us? I thought it was more complicated than that?

The question of inflation/devaluation aside - one thing I would like to see, that I think would better ground this discussion in actual facts:

We already list the total amount and names of the Developer Incentive winners every month.

Once this compensation is complete, I'd like to see Linden post the total amount given out in compensation, and the names of the Avatars receiving compensation, in order of amount received.... just like they do with the Developer Incentive.

I think those stats would be interesting, to say the least.

taxes were in SL long ago, and found it was a drain and basically a awful mess. It stifled creativity and finally was done away with in 1.2.

People should really read the SL History wiki more.

Tax me, spank me, pull my hair

This is pure magic.

However, if you threaten to spit on me again, there's gonna be trouble.

Yes. Kris earned a few thousand esteem points with that one.

Now if only her comely and charming forum avatar would return.

But... but... JUGGLING HAMSTERS!!!!

True, it was going for like $4.25/L$1000 there for awhile and now its like $4.02. But it also fell to this low and even lower before, and made its way back up again several times.



I see the difference as this:

"We're compensating the telehub land owners so their lawyers don't drill us a new hole. We're creating some L$ to do that. Sorry for the inflation."

VS.

"We're compensating the telehub land owners so their lawyers don't drill us a new hole. To help facilitate this, we will be taking L$ from your account and giving it to the telehub land owners. Sorry for stealing from you."

To me it really does not matter if its L$1 or L$1000. Its the principle that this would be directly robbing Peter to pay Paul, especially since its based on assumtions that Paul is due something I personally feel is not his due.

I guess I feel that if LL really feels they must pay reparations, perhaps they should make this payment in RL$ from their own company pockets (as a loss, not passed on to other customers who did not do anything deserving of being fined) or as tier fees, etc, and not involve actual L$ amounts.

Travis mentioned wanting to see a list of people that get the telehub reparations.... I want to see this list published as well.

-Ghoti

why would i want to pay tax to a game company? why would i pay tax twice, once to LL, and once to the government, on the same income?

Even if printing money devalues the L$, it's not clear that this is always a bad thing.

The possibility discussed - L$ sells for less US$, so people need to sell more L$ to make tier, so they raise their L$ prices - is one possibility.

But an equally valid possibility is: L$ sells for less US$, so people need to sell more L$ to make tier, but people can also get L$ more easily (it's cheaper/better value), so they buy more stuff, creators see the devaluation effect cancelled out by the extra sales, and non-creators get a higher quality-of-SL for their buck.

The original poster puts forward that we already pay taxes in one way or another...

and so I counter that the wealth is already 'redistrubuted' - via lindex.

Kris Ritter summed up my feelings on this issue very nicely, and colorfully.

Well said, Kris!

Moved to Land and the Economy Forum for further discussion.

isn't the lindex buying rate L$269 for US$1?

that's US$3.72 for 1000 linden