Worse than a Hamma Ban

Heh, never happen.

About the time someone realizes they will get paid in fake money for the fake assets it will become a non-issue.

Only place they will want their cut is when someone sells fake property for real money. A practice I have always considered idiotic.

Otherwise it is like making you pay real taxes on your hotel in Monopoly.

 

What utter nonsense. It just shows that at some point, when you learn too much, you start to get stupid. Or, at the very least, loose touch with the real world. Only a professional "academic" could come up with something so far removed from reality.

Really, polls are a shady lot and not always the brightest bulb, but which one is so stupid as get laughed out of Washington by proposing such a bill?

If that day should come, I will start to think that I have lived too long.

 

Look on the bright side -- if we can be taxed real money on virtual income, it goes both ways; there's no reason we can't pay our whole tax burden, even the real-world money part, with virtual money.

The government would be a lot smaller, and you'd be able to tell who they are in-game -- they would all have ten different epic mounts.

 

thanks symen, that was a great response!!!

 

A most excellent logical course of events. Good one!

 

Well, the State views a tax return as taxable income. So I don't see it as so far-fetched.

In Ohio, your State tax refund is considered a taxable income for the next year. You get a refund from 2004, in 2005 it is taxable.

Basically pay tax on the taxes you paid too much for before. I'm surprised the IRS hasn't started doing this.

The State is always looking for new things to tax. Besides, I pay taxes on property I will never really own in real life. Why not in a virtual world?

The State could even take virtual assets as payment, then sell them on Ebay or something, then charge even more taxes for whatever reason.

In fact, I'm surprised the States didn't buy up the PS3's and sell them on Ebay, with a huge tax for "Property currently unnavailable to citizens, since the State has them".

They are trying now to tax email and IM's, so why would anything else seem unreasonable?

 

First Tax collecter I see in EVE gets podded.

 

Are you talking about the email/IM tax HOAX that gets floated around about a zillion times a year?

There is a reason it is called REAL estate. It doesn't matter if your means do not allow you immediate ownership. It is still real property. Virtual property is as taxable as Pokemon power points.

I'll be totally surprised if this entire article isn't traced back to The Onion or someplace.

 

The 'real' in real estate comes from the Spanish word 'real', meaning 'royal'. If you ever forget to pay your property taxes, it becomes immediately apparent how accurate that is, too.

/My first after-school job was in real estate (data-entry). One of those random things I picked up, I guess...

 

Probably about the time "royal" didn't mean "inbred moron" too.

 

Probably more of how do you tax transactions in a Second Life economy where you are paying real money, sort of, to buy virtual items. The state always wants its cut!