If you thought the government couldn’t possibly find new ways to pillage your wallet—surprise! Colorado’s bureaucratic wizardry is now eyeing your Netflix subscription as “tangible personal property.” Yeah, apparently High-Def pixels count as real estate now. This madness comes courtesy of some tangled nonsense in Colorado tax law and landed in court thanks to a browser extension developer who dared ask: “You’re taxing what now?”
The Bullet Point Brief
- Colorado thinks your Netflix downloads are basically property. Because apparently binge-watching Ozark is the same as owning a lawnmower.
- The Department of Revenue wants streaming content taxed like physical goods under sales/use tax laws. Paging 1999…
- A judge already upheld it once, but now it’s headed to the state Court of Appeals—because logic took an early retirement.
- This all started when a dude from Parker challenged being taxed on digital downloads for his software extension business. Bureaucrats responded by reminding us they’ll tax air if they could meter it.
My Take
People wonder why they can’t afford to live in Colorado anymore—well, here’s Exhibit A: we tax everything short of oxygen (for now), and apparently even that’s up for review at the Capitol clown car. When your state government believes streaming Stranger Things is equal to buying a couch, it might be time for an exorcism—of logic, math, and possibly Satan himself from our tax code.
We’ve officially hit peak idiocy when bureaucrats who probably still write checks think they understand digital economies well enough to treat software subscriptions like physical goods. What’s next? Charging rent on cloud storage? Taxing likes on Instagram? This isn’t about fairness; it’s about feeding the ravenous beast that is big government—one pixel at a time.
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