New Illinois/Democrat LAW says it will tax websites per USER

Last week the ghastly Democrat who rules Illinois, JB Pritzker, signed a $56-billion budget that includes a new tax.  (For young Americans, a govt budget is a law, and usually very long, so cunning dictators can bury LOTS of bad demands in its 1,600 pages.)

While all levels of government constantly devise new ways to tax their long-abused citizens, this one may be overturned, because it's on publishers.  And the Supreme Court has been striking down such taxes for ninety years.

The new law--buried in a seemingly innocent "budget" would impose a state tax on companies that publish on the Internet, according to the size of their audience.  They call it a “social media platform fee,” paid every month based on “the number of Illinois users from whom the social media platform collects data within a month.”

The bigger the audience, the bigger the tax.

Pritzker expects the new tax to bring in $200 million a year.  

Defending the tax, Pritzker said it “requires companies to pay for the mental health and educational degradation they’ve caused.”  So by his own admission the state is charging internet platforms for the effects of the posts and comments they publish.

But speculating on the exact effects of every post and comment is impossibly complex.  So how it would end up working would be a government committee (majority Democrat, of course) that would score every large publisher and social media website by some subjective guess of "harm."

Short answer: totally subjective.  And if that's accepted, it's the end of any speech the government doesn't like.  

Taxing publishers because they are publishers is one of the oldest tools a state has used against the press, going back to the 1765 Stamp Act on pamphlets and newspapers that helped light the fuse for the Revolution.

Taxes on profits are supposedly uniform.  Taxing inventory is a far goofier concept.  Taxing news-print and ink?  The Supreme Court has said that's a tax explicitly on publishing, and has overturned that and similar laws again and again, including a law that taxed some publications while exempting others, which the new Dem law would do.

The Supreme Court says states can tax income, but that taxes that target speakers for their speech aren't allowed.

The cunning Democrats did find a way to avoid having to define "reader" or "user" of social media platforms, by wording the law to cover the number of users on which the platform "gathers data."  That's brilliant, because every click on a website is recorded and the data sold in some way.  It's a determinable number.  See, Democrat rulers iz reelly clever when they smell money.

But they can't avoid the core issue, which is: If any level of government can charge you for the effects of what you publish, it has implicity seized the power to *evaluate the effects of what you publish.*

Ahhhh.

From there the certain next step is for "the committee" to RULE that posts and comments on liberal websites like BlueSky do no harm at all, so they wouldn't owe any tax, while ruling the opposite for conservative publishers.  

"See, it's totally FAIR, citizen: all based on the harm each publisher causes.  And of course that's determined by totally unbiased Democrat rulers."

Source.

https://reclaimthenet.org/pritzkers-social-media-tax-a-200-million-bet-against-the-first-amendment