What the hell is going on in Illinois?What the hell is going on in Illinois?

Since the Illinois state government is demonstrating how stupid they are with their 0.2% tax on bitcoin transfers (#1509984) it's probably a good time to revisit one of their other money-grabbing tax tactics: a per-user tax on social media platforms.

source

All is not well in the State of Illinois:

The tax foundation article goes on to explain that the Illinois law is a bit of a mess. It taxes the “average number of monthly users of the platform located in the State of Illinois” but does not offer a definition of a user:

Nor does it define what a Illinois user is:

And there's so much more. Read to this bit about the inflation adjustment provision in the tax:

The problems don’t end there. The tax is $6 per user per year, denominated as $0.50 per user per month for large social media platforms, and lesser amounts per user for smaller platforms. Starting in 2028, these amounts are adjusted for inflation, but the inflation indexation provision is broken. According to the new law, the taxes are to be “increased by an amount equal to the annual unadjusted percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for the 12-month period ending with the March preceding each July 1, including all previous adjustments, rounded down to the nearest whole number.”

The first problem is survivable: ending the period in the March preceding July 1, for a January 1 adjustment, makes very little sense. It appears likely that the budget writers did a sloppy cut-and-paste job from another inflation-adjusted provision for which the adjustment is made on July 1, not January 1. This makes the inflation adjustment a bit more stale than ideal, but while almost certainly an error, it doesn’t break the whole system. The next problem does.

The inflation adjustment is to be rounded down “to the nearest whole number.” The drafters surely meant “to the nearest cent,” but that is not what they wrote. If the tax begins at $0.50, and inflation is, say, 3 percent, then the inflation adjustment yields $0.515. Now round that down to the nearest whole number, and what do you get?

If we read this as rounding down just the inflation adjustment, then $0.015 rounds down to $0, and the tax remains $0.50 per account. But the text contains a further point of ambiguity: “increased by an amount” clearly references the increase rather than the total, but “including all previous adjustments,” while perhaps intended to extend the inflation adjustment for the whole period rather than simply adjusting from the prior adjustment, seems to reference the resulting number, $0.515. Round that down to the nearest whole number, and the tax is now $0. Given the patent absurdity of these results, state officials may believe they have the authority to fix this through regulations, but the errors speak to the slapdash way policymakers adopted a significant, complex new tax.

Also, apparently platforms cannot charge Illinois users extra to cover the cost of the new tax:

I'm not sure if this is further signs that governments intend to lock-down and gate access to internet services behind kyc, or if it's just that the state government in Illinois is a corrupt, money-grubbing institution that is trying to squeeze dollars out of everything they can see.