Browse by Media Hit and Tax Reform

Since 1998, the federal government has prohibited states and localities from imposing such taxes. This has helped Americans from all backgrounds gain access to the Internet. The economic and educational benefits of this policy are vast and immeasurable. It is long past time for Congress to make permanent the ban on Internet access taxes.

If Donald Trump were successful, multinationals like Apple, Google, they wouldn't have to try to use the tax system to hide their profits in other countries, IPI's Merrill Matthews tells The Street's Emily Stewart.

The R&D tax credit has been a “temporary” provision in the tax code since 1981. Each time the credit is about to expire, Congress rallies support to renew the tax break from those who benefit from it. As the libertarian IPI puts it, “this cycle has repeated itself for years ... Congress essentially uses this cycle to raise money for re-election, promising the industry more predictability the next time around.”

Critics say the provision would allow states to harass businesses. "It opens the door to a grotesque expansion of state tax collection authority that is almost certainly unconstitutional, and places mandates upon the states that are probably unconstitutional as well," said IPI's Tom Giovanetti.

Will Deener, Dallas Morning News columnist, recently moaned about how big U.S. companies engaged in real businesses are avoiding paying billions in taxes because "the nation’s largest companies stockpile billions of dollars in profits overseas." In the process, he assumed that companies would pay the highest federal income tax rate of 35 percent on all overseas profits repatratriated. That's simply wrong, and it's astonishing that someone with his experience doesn't know any better.

At the end of the 113th Congress, lawmakers kicked the proverbial can down the road when they left the issue of taxing internet access to the 114th Congress.  Will 2015 be the year something changes?

A federal policy think-tank this week released a new document detailing the impacts of tax uncertainty on the ag sector, including the "will they or won't they" nature of Section 179 reinstatement. In commentary on Section 179 and ag tax issues, IPI President Tom Giovanetti says Congress' latest move on the 2014 expensing provision was essentially too little too late.

Congress shouldn't try to combine the MFA with the Internet Tax Fairness Act, which would ban Internet access taxes, said IPI's Bartlett Cleland. If that happens, the "recent protests in Hungary opposing similar attempts will look mild compared to the anger of an electorate full of online consumers that deserves much better," he said.

Bartlett Cleland calls it "The horribly Ill-Named Marketplace Fairness Act."

If the moratorium were "allowed to expire, states would begin to collect taxes on Internet access, or apply other discriminatory taxes that may already be in place but which have been held at bay during the moratorium," said IPI's Bartlett Cleland.