Across Africa, governments are increasingly taxing Internet access, sometimes targeting specific websites and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. This raises questions about the digital infrastructure and how it mediates relations between states and citizens in Africa. Comparing recent efforts in Guinea and Benin with tax Internet data, this article argues that these…
Throughout time, the European Union's media policy has attempted to strengthen the internal market for audiovisual services through economic and cultural measures. To anticipate or react to the dominance of foreign platforms, the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) extends its quota regime and obligation to invest in European works to on-demand audiovisual players, also when ta…
Newspapers that are using greater numbers of freelance journalists in an attempt to reduce payroll budgets may be forced by the IRS to pay taxes on such independent contractors. However, laws regarding the taxation of independent contractors are vague. The IRS has constructed its own set of criteria to determine the employee status of such people in the absence of legislation from Congress. Fre…
The central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign was how to allocate the projected federal budget surplus. George W. Bush proposed returning much of this revenue via an across-the-board reduction in federal income taxes. In contrast, Al Gore argued that most of the surplus should be put aside in a lockbox in order to bolster the Social Security and Medicare programs. This article finds that …
This paper reconstructs levels of cinemagoing in Britain over the two decades preceding the first accepted estimates of the national audience, which were produced in 1934. It uses the receipts from the tax on entertainments, levied by British governments starting in 1916, to examine the impact of broader developments, from war to major economic downturns, and radical changes within the industry…
In 1995, Congress eliminated the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Minority Tax Certificate Program--a nonintrusive method of encouraging increased participation of minority entrepreneurs as owners in the broadcast and cable industries. Since that time, minorities have faced increased difficulties competing in all facets of the communications industry. These difficulties can be attribut…
President Trump has long maintained that the United States is engaged in an economic competition with the world and that globalization has only heightened that competition. He is correct--at least with regards to tax policy. The Republican tax reform has understandably drawn intense reactions from across the domestic political spectrum, but the international community has also been paying close…
Of the many proposals to reverse the obesity epidemic, the most contentious is the use of price-based interventions such as the fat tax. Previous investigations of the efficacy of such initiatives in altering consumption behavior yielded contradictory findings. In this article, we use six years of point-of-sale scanner data for milk from a sample of over 1,700 supermarkets across the United Sta…
Tax certificates are an example of successful incentive regulation. Prior to its repeal in 1995, section 1071 of the Internal Revenue Code permitted the tax-free sale or exchange of media properties to effectuate policies of the Federal Communications Commission. Enacted by Congress in 1943, this provision was originally used to soften the hardship created by involuntary sales of broadcast prop…
Over the past decade, the federal earned income tax credit (EITC) has become the largest antipoverty program in the United States. For the 2002 tax year, working families with children can receive as much as $4, 140 in EITC benefits. Although families may arrange to receive benefits throughout the year (through their paychecks), most receive a lump sum after filing federal income taxes. Researc…