Fortunately, there are sensible people, such as Councilman Bill Green, who called the Philly Blog Tax a nonsense (read the news piece here)
The original Philadelphia’s Blogger Tax requires bloggers to pay the Gov’t either a one-time $300 “business privilege license” or $50 per year.
To me, the tax amount is ridiculous – if you have tried to make money out from your blogs, you must have already known that it’s darn hard to make a few dollars from your blogs, let alone making $50 a year just to break even with the blogger tax.
Yes, there are bloggers who are making 3- or 4-digit – even more – a month, but I’d say 90% of bloggers worldwide don’t. Some are not making any in their years of blogging; some are trying hard to make money from their blogs, only getting less than $50 a year – not even enough to pay the yearly blogger tax.
So, if you are a Philly resident who blogs and displaying Google AdSense on your blog, you’ll receive a notice requiring you to pay $300/one-time or $50/year for the license.
Have you tried to monetize your blogs using Google AdSense? Well, I’ll say – unless you have 1,000 visitors a day, you’ll end-up making pennies per day – if you are lucky.
And here’s the fact: 80% of my blogs are making less than $5 a month from Google AdSense. How cool is that if I was living in Philly and required to pay taxes on the blogs?
Maybe, just maybe, this is another reason why every people – especially the law-makers – should blog and try to make money from their blogs for a certain period of time. THEN they can decide on HOW MUCH TO TAX, instead of stating a certain amount of taxes that raise many eyebrows.
Finally – Tax break Proposal
Luckily, some are still listening to the people (and following common-sense) – a proposed legislation would exempt bloggers and other business owners making less than $100,000 in revenue from certain taxes, including the Philly Blog Tax.
The proposal comes from Councilman Bill Green and Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez, and they introduced www.forwardphiladelphia.com to allow Philly business owners – including bloggers – to calculate how much they should pay the taxes under their new system.
Let’s see how it goes. Fingers crossed.
Ivan Widjaya
Blogger tax sucks