Freelance Drupal Developers concerned about proposed 6.5% new Massachusetts tax on Web Dev services

Obviously this will affect all freelance software people, not just Drupal developers. But I think we need more than just programmers on our side. We need to make the argument that there's no logical difference between taxing one kind of service and some other kind of service. If the sales tax is to be expanded to cover software development services, why not impose a sales tax on all services? A lot more money could be raised by imposing a 6.5% sales tax on medical services than on custom software design. And what about electrician services? Plumbing services? Etc.

Of course Patrick is too cowardly to propose taxing doctors, electricians, plumbers, etc. If he did, he'd have his head handed to him on a silver platter. Cowardly politicians like Gov. Patrick attack only the easiest targets. And historically, attacking freelance software developers has been seen by politicians as a no-lose approach. Programmers have always been seen as a politically disorganized group.

• In the 1970s and 1980s, freelance programmers had been treated like all other freelancers. Under Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978, there was a Safe Harbor provision for freelance workers that said that if they'd been traditionally treated as self-employed, they would continue to be treated that way. But in the 1986 Federal tax reform bill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan inserted the infamous Section 1706 which revokes that Safe Harbor status for computer programmers, but leaves it intact for bookkeepers, lawyers, accountants, and other sorts of professions that have traditionally been better at political organizing and might be seen by a politician as a danger to his career if he were to cross them! It took a few years for the IRS to start enforcing 1706, but once they did, companies refused to deal with freelancer programmers. If you wanted to work that way, you had to go through an agency, and the agency then got to take a significant chunk out of your pay.
• In the 1980s, Massachusetts laid off a lot of teachers. The ignorant politicians in the legislature, thinking that one kind of writing's no different from another, set up a program to get English teachers hired as tech writers. For the next decade or so, we programmers had to deal with "tech writers" who were clueless about tech writing. They'd take an accurate but difficult-to-comprehend description written by the software author, and instead of making it easier to comprehend while keeping the meaning the same, they'd oversimplify it so it was easy to comprehend -- AND WRONG! And because they'd been schooled in creative writing rather than tech writing, they thought it bad form to use the same word for something several times in a row. So you'd end up having the same thing described 5 different ways in the course of one or two paragraphs. Good luck figuring out that all the references were talking about the same thing. But the fact that they created problems for someone else was no skin off the noses of the politicians who'd created the problem.
• In the 1990 immigration reform bill, Congress added a provision that coupled a temporary visa known as H-1B (ostensibly intended to alleviate a projected shortage of technical experts that never actually materialized) with a permanent visa (green card) at the end of 5 years, but only if the foreign worker kept their sponsoring employer happy. During the height of the Internet boom in the mid-to-late 1990s, UC-Davis Computer Science Professor Norman Matloff noticed that, although the political spin-machines were regularly issuing press-releases hyping a huge programmer shortage, his software engineer friends in their 40s were telling him they couldn't find work. By 2004 he found that, although there were 100,000 unemployed U.S. programmers and several hundred thousand underemployed U.S. programmers, we had 436,000 non-U.S. citizens were working as programmers in the U.S. Yet Congress refused to modify or repeal the visa program they themselves had had created to solve a non-existend programmer shortage. (See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf) In 2007, when a VP of a prominent immigration law firm was caught on tape saying to a roomful of software employers, "Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker," (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx--jNQYNgA&NR=1) politicians were embarrassed enough that they distanced themselves from the H-1B visa program. But when it came time to draft the current immigration bill, Sens. Schumer, Durbin, McCain, Rubio and the rest of the Gang of Eight inserted a clause that will put somewhere between half a million and a million U.S. programmers on the unemployment rolls over the next five years. Although they included a clause that superficially sounded like it would protect U.S. programmers, it was a mere fig leaf that would have been completely ineffective. But even that became irrelevant because Sen. Orin Hatch added further provisions that neutralize even the phony protections in the original bill.
• Just a few years ago, the Mass. Legislature screwed all software engineers and web developers and any other creative workers who want to own their own intellectual property. They made the requirements for companies to deal with independent contractors so onerous that no company will deal with an independent contractors in Massachusetts. (See http://www.wbur.org/2010/06/30/independent-contractor-law).

So, why should anyone be surprised that Deval Patrick's now proposing to tax only software services, but not other kinds of services? We programmers have always been seen as an easy mark. The only thing that will stop this kind of crap is if some high profile politician gets voted out of office because we fought back. That means organizing. No more of this, managing-programmers-is-like-herding-cats nonsense. Ben Franklin said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." Patrick's proposal may not be quite at the hanging stage, but surely if we do not stand together now, we will find ourselves individually standing on the unemployment line.

http://www.change.org/petitions/massachusetts-state-legislature-repeal-t...