Music is special
May. 13th, 2006 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThe new tax bill has some interesting provisions, the one which jumps out at me is that being a musician is now a special category of artist.
See, the way it works now, if one creates a work of art and sells it, it's the same as if one did any other sort of manufacture. One gets taxed on it as income (this is for private people, corporations get taxed under a different set of rules).
So make a song, a scuplture, a painting, a photograph, a fine piece of furniture, and it's the same as if one was selling bread, bales of hay, belts, shoes, candles, fruit juice, cages for animals, you name it.
Which means that one might pay as 35 percent of one's income as federal tax.
But if Bush signs the present bill (I'm willing to cover large wagers on this one... I'll even give odds) music will no longer be listed among the things which are taxed as are labor and those lesser creations as are made by sculptors, painters, photographer, potters, writers and rest of the mob.
Nope, the sale of self-created musical works has become a capital gain, and as such is taxed at not more than 15 percent.
Painters... well you see, music is special, it's not the same. Writers, well all you do is sit around and think. Photographers... heck the picture is out there, anyone could have taken it. Sculptors... all you did was knock the extr bits off, or slap some clay together to make the mold.
But musicians.... they have to pull themes, and melody and harmony out of the air, and add words.
That's fine for guys who are selling songs, but it's a slap in the face to other artists. Opera singers, they get a wage, so they can pay 35 percent. Cover artists, they didn't sell the song, just perform it, so they get to pay the higher rate.
Which is part of the problem of the tax code. It's being tweaked to do things. Which means it gets tweaked by those who have the money to buy the access to influence the people who write the laws. That's a postivie feedback loop, and it means the rich get richer and the poor pay for it.
I'm not against tax cuts, but I do think we have to get the money we need to pay for things from somewhere (yes, debt can be useful, but as a way to get those things which are needed to set things up, it's not a way to keep things going. In time of need there are things which require infusions of money, and if the economy can't pay for it now, a bit of borrowing is in order; but if the economy is strong enough to pay for things, it ought to be pay as we go. Tax and spend has always made more sense than spend and borrow).
I also think that money ought to come from those most able to afford it. The guy making five-million dollars can more readily afford to have a large chunk of the money above, oh, let's say 1 million, taxed at 50 percent, than can the guy at the other end, bringing in 20,000 a year can afford to have all of it taxed at 20 percent.
There are other oddities in that pattern to (though again, this gets into what we want a tax code to do... it's unavoidable that what the effects of a tax structure are will affect how it's built, which in turn reflects on the society which builds the code, but I digress). The more tax there is on high income, the less companies pay in high income, and the more they spread the profits around in terms of overall salary (though the most recent models for that also had a strong union structure, which probably had something to do with the wages of the mass of Americans) and investments in things like plant upgrades and the like, because that was a way to use the money without paying taxes on it.
If one wants a sad (and I hope not as accurate as it looks from where I sit) take on this problem, one should read, "American Theocracy". It's about more than just the marriage of the radical religious section of the polity and the Republican Party, it's about how we run the country, and how we are financing it on a bubble of debt. There was a time when the business of America was making things, now it's moving money around. There have been nations which did that, Spain, Holland, England. The high-water marks for them came before they made money the engine of the economy.
Spain excluded, we seem to be doing it worse than they did (Spain had no production economy when it became suddenly rich, and it didn't build one with the money it had coming in, why bother with working, when a bit of speculation would make the meanest of peasants rich?).
So if I were building a tax code I'd look to seeing to it those who have the least money keep the most of it. Not only because they need it, but they need it because they have to spend it. No long term deposits of the extra money of the people at the poverty line. They don't have the etra money. Which pumps the economy.
But we can rest easy now. The guys who know better than I do have decided selling songs is a capital gain, and doesn't need to be taxed as highly as my mere income.
See, the way it works now, if one creates a work of art and sells it, it's the same as if one did any other sort of manufacture. One gets taxed on it as income (this is for private people, corporations get taxed under a different set of rules).
So make a song, a scuplture, a painting, a photograph, a fine piece of furniture, and it's the same as if one was selling bread, bales of hay, belts, shoes, candles, fruit juice, cages for animals, you name it.
Which means that one might pay as 35 percent of one's income as federal tax.
But if Bush signs the present bill (I'm willing to cover large wagers on this one... I'll even give odds) music will no longer be listed among the things which are taxed as are labor and those lesser creations as are made by sculptors, painters, photographer, potters, writers and rest of the mob.
Nope, the sale of self-created musical works has become a capital gain, and as such is taxed at not more than 15 percent.
Painters... well you see, music is special, it's not the same. Writers, well all you do is sit around and think. Photographers... heck the picture is out there, anyone could have taken it. Sculptors... all you did was knock the extr bits off, or slap some clay together to make the mold.
But musicians.... they have to pull themes, and melody and harmony out of the air, and add words.
That's fine for guys who are selling songs, but it's a slap in the face to other artists. Opera singers, they get a wage, so they can pay 35 percent. Cover artists, they didn't sell the song, just perform it, so they get to pay the higher rate.
Which is part of the problem of the tax code. It's being tweaked to do things. Which means it gets tweaked by those who have the money to buy the access to influence the people who write the laws. That's a postivie feedback loop, and it means the rich get richer and the poor pay for it.
I'm not against tax cuts, but I do think we have to get the money we need to pay for things from somewhere (yes, debt can be useful, but as a way to get those things which are needed to set things up, it's not a way to keep things going. In time of need there are things which require infusions of money, and if the economy can't pay for it now, a bit of borrowing is in order; but if the economy is strong enough to pay for things, it ought to be pay as we go. Tax and spend has always made more sense than spend and borrow).
I also think that money ought to come from those most able to afford it. The guy making five-million dollars can more readily afford to have a large chunk of the money above, oh, let's say 1 million, taxed at 50 percent, than can the guy at the other end, bringing in 20,000 a year can afford to have all of it taxed at 20 percent.
There are other oddities in that pattern to (though again, this gets into what we want a tax code to do... it's unavoidable that what the effects of a tax structure are will affect how it's built, which in turn reflects on the society which builds the code, but I digress). The more tax there is on high income, the less companies pay in high income, and the more they spread the profits around in terms of overall salary (though the most recent models for that also had a strong union structure, which probably had something to do with the wages of the mass of Americans) and investments in things like plant upgrades and the like, because that was a way to use the money without paying taxes on it.
If one wants a sad (and I hope not as accurate as it looks from where I sit) take on this problem, one should read, "American Theocracy". It's about more than just the marriage of the radical religious section of the polity and the Republican Party, it's about how we run the country, and how we are financing it on a bubble of debt. There was a time when the business of America was making things, now it's moving money around. There have been nations which did that, Spain, Holland, England. The high-water marks for them came before they made money the engine of the economy.
Spain excluded, we seem to be doing it worse than they did (Spain had no production economy when it became suddenly rich, and it didn't build one with the money it had coming in, why bother with working, when a bit of speculation would make the meanest of peasants rich?).
So if I were building a tax code I'd look to seeing to it those who have the least money keep the most of it. Not only because they need it, but they need it because they have to spend it. No long term deposits of the extra money of the people at the poverty line. They don't have the etra money. Which pumps the economy.
But we can rest easy now. The guys who know better than I do have decided selling songs is a capital gain, and doesn't need to be taxed as highly as my mere income.
