Politics: Netizens United
Norquist, Grover G.
POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Netizens United F our years ago, the political world discovered "Soccer Moms" as a swing voter bloc. The November 7, 2000 election will be the first Internet...
...By late 1999, 81 million Americans did...
...Gilmore, fresh off his victory over the car tax, has called for abolishing sales and use taxes on all electronic commerce, abolishing the 3 percent federal phone tax, and permanently banning Internet access taxes...
...This would truly be taxation without representation...
...In focusing only on Internet access in the home, the report deliberately left out the millions of Americans who get Internet access through work, libraries, and schools...
...Today talk radio boasts a phalanx of conservative stalwarts: Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Dr...
...The battle lines are being drawn for the first Internet election...
...Congressional Republicans who would like to use opposition to Internet taxation to bring Internet users permanently into the Republican coalition were outraged when Governor Engler took an entire day—only days before he lost the Michigan primary for George W. Bush—to come to Washington to publicly lobby for taxing the Internet...
...This would do interesting things to themarket cap of those companies presently driving up the Dow Jones average...
...Congress thereupon created a 19-member commission to study the question of present and future taxation of the Internet...
...And unlike Soccer Moms, Internet users face an immediate threat—the drive to tax the Internet...
...Jerry Brown tried to become liberal answers to Rush Limbaugh, but there wasn't a market...
...On the Internet there is no liberal version of Matt Drudge...
...Earlier polls showed Internet users as being much more conservative...
...There are, however, important differences between the two categories...
...Laura Schlessinger, Michael Medved, 011ie North...
...Present law, adhering to the Constitution's commerce clause protections, forbids Utah from forcing Amazon.com to collect Utah's sales taxes when a citizen buys a book over the Internet...
...We have already seen the damage Alabama juries do to "foreign" auto companies in Detroit through the abuse of tort law...
...Jim Gilmore, a strong opponent of taxing the Internet...
...State and local governments see Internet growth as an opportunity for new taxes...
...The Internet has become part of American life faster than any previous technology...
...Ron Wyden pushed for a permanent ban, but pressure from Al Gore's office and Democratic mayors weakened the legislation to a three-year ban...
...They argue that a purchase from a local bookstore adds, say, a 6 percent sales tax to the final price, while a purchase from Amazon.com results in no sales tax collected...
...Congress became alarmed that the 50 states and 6,000 local taxing jurisdictions could destroy the Internet with conflicting and overlapping taxes on access to the Internet...
...It is now a tax on every American with a phone, despite a widely held belief that the Spanish-American war ended some time ago...
...Sixty-two percent of white registered voters say they use the Internet, as do 64 percent of black registered voters...
...In late February, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers formally came out for imposing sales and use taxes on electronic commerce...
...Lastyear the Commerce Department published "Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide," a study claiming that blacks and Hispanics have less access to the Internet than whites...
...It needed only seven years to penetrate 30 percent of the American population...
...The venom reserved for Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy in 1994 is now showered on Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report recently topped 1.2 million visitors in one day...
...That year, the 44 percent of Americans who didn't listen to talk radio broke evenly between Republicans and Democrats...
...Only tobacco and liquor are more heavily taxed...
...T he biggest danger is posed by pro-Internet tax governors and mayors who invoke "fairness" and say they're defending Mom-and-Pop shops and other "Main Street businesses...
...Sixty-three percent of conservatives, liberals, and moderates use the Net...
...Her February poll of daily Internet users found Bush and McCain each defeating Gore...
...It created a single American mar-44 If every city and state could tax Amazon.com, it would truly be taxation without representation...
...ket and stopped states from attacking "foreign" (out of state) businesses...
...The Internet's building blocks—all telecommunications, including phone and cable lines—are already one of the most heavily taxed parts of the American economy...
...The Clinton administration and the Democratic Party — surprise, surprise —have now injected race into the discussion: the so-called digital divide...
...We do not want to create a situation in which Alabama politicians can levy taxes on New York businesses...
...Al Gore has refused to oppose such taxes, and the administration's representatives on the Electronic Commerce Commission have always sided with the pro-tax forces...
...By contrast, "The Digital Melting Pot," a study published by Forrester Research, as well as research conducted by the United States Internet Council have found that growing access to and use of the Internet by women and minorities have already narrowed any "divide" to almost zero...
...The first excise tax on telecommunications was imposed in 1898 to fund the Spanish-American War...
...There are no nationally syndicated liberal talk show hosts...
...To solve the "fairness" problem, one resolution before the Internet commission would urge states to lower or abolish sales taxes on big-ticket items such as computers...
...Jim Hightower, the former Texas politician, former New York Gov...
...Virginia's Gov...
...This is not for lack of trying...
...It was advertised as a temporary tax on rich Web users are the newest voting group that matters...
...Republican prospects of winning the Internet vote are muddied by GOP governors such as Utah's Michael Leavitt and Michigan's John Engler, who give Gore and the Democrats cover by themselves calling for taxation of electronic commerce...
...Conservative pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick found that 30 percent of registered voters log on every day, and of those, one in ten uses the Internet "over two hours per day...
...It understands that, like talk radio, an unregulated Internet allows public GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Republicans have a 9-point edge over Democrats in Internet usage...
...By contrast, personal computers required 13 years, television 17 years, and the telephone 38 years...
...The November 7, 2000 election will be the first Internet Election, the first in which "Netizens" —Americans who work, play, shop, and get their news on the Internet—are a sizable and coherent voter group...
...This "Electronic Commerce Commission" is currently chaired by Virginia Gov...
...If every city and state could tax Amazon.com, it would expose Amazon to harassment from tens of thousands of jurisdictions that have no voters who care about its fate...
...They are wrong...
...It's estimated that Americans will send 7 trillion e-mail messages this year...
...A June 1999 study by Ernst & Young found that, because most e-commerce is business to business, or involves the sale of intangible services or products like food which aren't subject to sales taxes, the actual "loss" to state and local sales tax collection was $170 million in 1998—one-tenth of one percent of sales taxes collected...
...54 April 2000 The American Spectator people —only loo,000 folks had phones in 1898...
...In addition, state and local governments impose an average excise tax on telecommunications of 4.1 percent, and these local taxes run as high as 28.6 percent in Texas, 24.5 percent in Florida, and 15.8 percent in Washington, D.C...
...Still, the liberal establishment has reacted to the Internet as it did to talk radio...
...Voters who listened one to three hours a week gave the GOP a three-point advantage...
...While Internet users look like a cross section of America, Fitzpatrick also found that "the more frequently a voter uses the Internet, the more likely he is to identify himself as a Republican and vote for a Republican candidate for President...
...debate to proceed unfiltered by the liberal press...
...But when faced with this option, the pro-tax governors and mayors drop their concern for Main Street businesses to get back to the real point: They want more tax dollars...
...It's much easier to reach Internet users directly, via Websites and e-mail...
...Those who listened five to eight hours a week gave the GOP a 12-point margin and those who listened ir hours or more favored Republicans by two to one...
...In a definitive study on how taxing e-commerce would affect Internet sales, the University of Chicago Business School's Austan Goolsbee found that taxation would reduce e-commerce by 24 percent or more...
...r* The American Spectator • April 2000 55...
...To prevent the immediate destruction of the Internet, Congress in 1998 passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which mandated a three-year moratorium on new state and local taxes on the Internet...
...It turns out that taxpayers looking for ways to cut government spending have been wrong to focus solely on Washington...
...The commerce clause is not a loophole...
...The trend is beginning to mirror the 1994 Republican Revolution among talk-radio listeners...
...Originally, Rep...
...State and local government revenue grew from 6.9 percent to 9 percent of GDP from 1968 to 1998, a period when federal revenues fell from 20.5 percent to 18.7 percent...
...John McCain have introduced legislation to ban sales and use taxes on electronic commerce...
...Mario Cuomo, and former California Gov...
...In 1998, the 5o states ended the year with $11 billion in surpluses...
...In 1993, only 90,000 Americans had access to the Internet...
...On top of this, many governors and urban machines now want to impose new taxes on electronic commerce—and thereby overturn Supreme Court decisions that have protected interstate commerce since the creation of state sales taxes 70 years ago...
...But this overlooks that a buyer of, say, $100 in books, while saving $6 in sales tax, is paying $12 in shipping fees, and in so doing generating a whole different sort of beneficial economic activity and traffic...
...Republicans this year are choosing not only between McCain and Bush, but between Gilmore and Leavitt, as to whether the GOP will be friend or foe of the Internet...
...Claiming that their states are losing much needed tax revenues, pro-tax politicians insist these new taxes can be imposed without damaging either the Internet or the Constitution...
...Nor is there a liberal Town Hall, the Heritage Foundation's Web page that connects many conservative sites.p olitical leaders now think of Internet users as the new Soccer Moms — a new demographic group that could swing the 2000 elections...
...John Kasich and Sen...
...This writer serves on the commission as the Consumer Representative...
...Chris Cox of California and Oregon Sen...
Vol. 33 • April 2000 • No. 3
