AudioScape Trade-in Program

1. I'm guessing your spell check changed politicians to potatoes, but I'm gonna steal that now and start calling them potatoes.

2. I get that a single piece of gear getting taxed multiple times raises questions about why it is taxed more than once, which in simplistic terms does make a person want to ask such questions. I paid taxes when I bought it, why is it being taxed AGAIN when I sell it to someone else?

Fair enough, but it's really effectively the transaction that is being taxed, not the gear itself, when you really think about it. As a related example, we don't pay income tax in Texas, so some people in other states are jealous of that when they hear about it. But then we conversely have one of if not THE highest property tax rates in the country. And we're taxed on that property every single year, even though we only bought the property once. Gotta pay for roads and services one way or another. Property tax. Income tax. Sales tax. Whatever.

The point of all of that being that it's all just different ways of paying for the same thing. Now, there are of course arguments to be made about how much the government should or shouldn't be actually spending and the specific tax rates necessary to fund that level of spending, but as far as the specific type of taxing mechanism itself is concerned, I try not to get too hung up on that, as long as the type of taxing mechanism and rate is applied in an equitable manner (it often isn't though).

I think a lot of us just got used to the idea of not paying tax on these sort of gear related transactions, even though we probably should have been paying taxes on those sort of transactions all along. And, not for nothing, but before the federal government started cracking down on mail order companies like Sweetwater, they had a built in price advantage over local mom and pops who still had to charge sales tax. That whole situation went on that way for many years, and certainly didn't ease the plight of the local mom and pop music stores, and I think most of us here would agree that it's a shame what has happened to the local music stores, record stores, independent venues, etc. It's all gotten real corporate, and that's honestly where I lay the most blame for this stuff. If large corporations actually paid a more equitable tax rate, maybe the effective tax rate, that us regular joes pay on things like gear transactions, could go down.