You could tax XXX movies, videos, DVDs. Of course, too onerous of a tax leads you to libertarian’s unintended consequences. Lot’s of black market porn, for one.
Like Hamlet said, “strict scrutiny.”
Of course, this is taxation where the power of the government is almost plenary. I’m not sure that this is a content-based restriction if the tax is small enough to avoid looking punitive. If it really will raise revenue and there are some reasonable justifications, it might work.
For example, if California put a ten cent tax on every XXX video, DVD, whatever, filmed, produced, or distributed in California. Throw in some stuff about XXX stars being high on drugs and needing rehabilitation and job training after their porn careers.
How do you tax internet porn? Easy: you tax the server who’s got pornographic content. Since there’s a lot of small-time ISPs out there, this would discourage them from allowing their customers to have that content.
What are we going to consider “pornographic”? Again, the statute would have to be narrowly tailored, and courts are going to have to be allowed to be creative. I don’t expect this to be perfect, just feasible. And again, a lot of stuff is porn by nature: for example, I’d expect anything sold in a sex shop to fall under that definition.
Porn is massively underground anyway that you would have a hard time finding anybody significant to tax. You might be able to run a couple of small outfits into the ground but porn will still make it onto the market untaxed one way or another.
In short, even if you could get everybody to agree with it, it would be about as successful as prohibition.
About taxing “XXX videos”: We do understand, don’t we, that there is no such thing as a XXX rating? That it is just a publicity gimmick from within the industry, dating back to when there was a legitimate ‘X’ rating?
And the idea of a “list of examples” does not work – laws/regulations have to be of general enough application that every single item to be taxed need not be taken to court. If you define ‘XXX’ it as meaning “explicit portrayal of genital penetration”, what do you do about a scuplture from the Hindu temple friezes at Khahurajo? Or a piece of pottery from the Peruvian Mochi culture? What do you do with the vid that porn actress/producer Hyapatia Lee made around 1990, that was published as an explicit ‘documentary’ about alleged Native American sexual healing practices; which was really a series of hardcore NA-themed porn-scenes connected by new-agey ‘cultural’ intros?
The “underground” element doesn’t bother me too much–the law just needs to be specifc enough that the IRS can figure out how to enforce it.
The thing about taxes is that there’s all kinds of stuff that slips through the cracks. Take your income taxes: how many people honestly report every profit they make at a garage sale, every tip they get from a customer, or even “under the table” transactions? That doesn’t change the existence of the income tax, it just means that a lot of people find ways to slip through it.
Since the big hangup for everyone seems to be “you can’t define porn,” then let’s bring the challenge back to you: how would YOU define “porn” such that it catches the explicit sexploitation stuff without netting things like art instead?
Considering that most of the items sold at a garage sale are sold for less than what the original consumer paid for them, they should count as a Capital Loss!
Of course, a bigger problem with garage sales is that the seller is supposed to pay sales tax on every sale, but doesn’t. (Assuming the garage sale is taking place in a State with a sales tax, that is.)
I submit flatly that it cannot be done. If I were on a commission tasked with such a responsibility, I would resign.
(I love the SDMB. Only here can you get a serious, complex sociopolitical debate that includes both citations to caselaw and the word “bitchslapped,” and nobody bats an eye. :D)
As I look over the OP once again, I notice that you don’t really have to levy a tax, so how about a War on Pornography? Thirty years from now, you can have double the prison population, new classes of crime created out of whole cloth, and something for politicians to blather about in their speeches.
I’m trying to picture the mechanics of the proposed stripper tax. “OK hon, the ten dollar bill for the lap dance goes in the garter belt on my left leg, and the buck for the tax goes in the garter belt on my right leg.”
It’s a great idea, but I agree that it would be too hard to define pornography. There is little question about what constitutes “alcohol” or “gasoline” or “cigarettes”. Pornography is too vague.
Hey, is it my fault that where is live the cost of living, or at least of lap dances, is relatively low? Oh so I’ve heard from friends who frequent such places
