P'unk Avenue Window

Philly does not have a special tax on bloggers. All the outrage about this is silly and overblown. So why am I still ticked off at the city? Because Philly has a tax code that punishes new businesses, period.

Many news outlets are carrying the story of the “Philly blog tax.” This staff opinion piece in the Washington Examiner is typical. Bloggers are waking up to discover that the city demands they pay $300! Sarah Palin was right— the First Amendment is dead!

Except that’s not what happened at all.

1. These bloggers were deriving a (very small) amount of income from ads. They signed up for that, provided bank account numbers so Google or whoever could pay them, the whole bit. They were very much aware they were trying to make money, successfully or not.

2.They reported that income to the IRS.

3. The IRS made that information available to the city and state authorities, and the city did what it did with everyone who operates a business in the city: they required the business owner to pay their one-time, lifetime $300 business license fee.

The city is not gunning for bloggers or even looking for blogs at all. They are just reading the information the IRS gives them.

Bloggers who are not trying to make money- bloggers who are not running ads for a cut of the profit- are not being required to pay $300. There is no free speech issue here.

You can certainly argue that the city shouldn’t require a business license for entities that have not earned at least $100 in a given year. I would agree with you— $100 would be twice the city’s alternative $50 annual fee for those who don’t want to shell out $300 up front in the belief that their business will one day be viable. A $100 cutoff seems fair and sane.

You can also argue that local taxes are unnecessarily complicated, requiring small business owners to pay as much to accountants as they do to the local government because their tax software refuses to even consider handling every little municipality’s crazy unique tax code. I would agree with you there too. State and local taxes on personal and business earnings should be percentages of your adjusted gross income, or the corporate equivalent. Nothing more complicated than that. (Property tax is another story entirely.)

But the city is not specifically going after bloggers. They are doing what they have always done to collect taxes on all business activities in Philly.

Two recent Inky stories got the facts right, but it’s worth emphasizing the most important point: the city is responding to information from the IRS about people who reported business income to the feds but not to the city. That’s it, and that’s all. They have no idea which businesses are blogs. The underlying problem is that Philly punishes new businesses in general.

We will be expanding soon to create a project room for P’unk Ave (war room, for you violent types). The expansion space is in the row home next door to the studio (in fact, it was the original studio space of P’unk Avenue.)

In preparation, I have been going through some boxes that were stored there.

In one of the boxes, I found some mix tapes. Over the years, I have been paring them down. (Maybe 4 years ago, I put more than a hundred on the steps of the studio with a free sign and they disappeared within a couple of hours.) For some reason, I have had trouble deaccessioning the ones that were made for me or ones I made together with a good friend.

For instance, the one pictured above was made with my friend Steve. He brought over his records and CDs and together we made this mix. As many of you remember, mix tapes were made in real time so this process took a couple of hours, a few beers were consumed and many things were discussed. I don’t recall what we talked about, but I have such a warm memory of that evening.

It has been hard to imagine parting with this tape, since one glance at it and I feel that all is right with the world for an instant. Taking this picture has been cathartic, though. This tape is in the box destined for Goodwill this week.