Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2011 16:08:03 +0000 (UTC)
From: “Amazon.com Associates Program” <no-r...@amazon.com>
To: “xxxx...@bkpark.com” <xxxx...@bkpark.com>
Subject: Important Update for California Associates

Hello,

As you may have heard, California Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation repealing the law that had forced us to terminate our California Associates. We are pleased to invite all California Associates whose accounts were closed due to the prior legislation to re-enroll in the Associates Program.

If you haven’t already re-enrolled, please click here:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/reinstatement/main.html

When asked to sign in, please use the same email address and password that were previously associated with your Associates account. To make your return to the Program as seamless as possible, when you re-enroll, your account settings (login, Associates ID, payment information, etc.) will be the sam=
e as they were previously.

For further information about re-enrollment, please click here:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t48

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Well, I guess I’ll enroll today (even though chances are near negligible that I’ll make a buck through the program). I’m hopeful this might be turning tide against tax-hungry states, but this could also be just the eye of the storm: IIRC, Amazon has one year to get Congress to settle Internet sales tax issues (I know, separate from the issue addressed here) before they may have to start collecting tax in CA.

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:22:16 +0000 (UTC)
From: “Amazon.com Associates Program” <asso...@amazon.com>
To: “xxxx...@bkpark.com” <xxxx...@bkpark.com>
Subject: Notice of Contract Termination Due to Potential New California Law

Hello,

For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of California residents. Unfortunately, a potential new law that may be signed by Governor Brown compels us to terminate this program for California-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by California-based marketing affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

As a result, we will terminate contracts with all California residents that are participants in the Amazon Associates Program as of the date (if any) that the California law becomes effective. We will send a follow-up notice to you confirming the termination date if the California law is enacted. In the event that the California law does not become effective before September 30, 2011, we withdraw this notice. As of the termination date, California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/ ], Endless.com [ http://www.endless.com/ ], MYHABIT.COM [ http://www.myhabit.com/ ] or SmallParts.com [ http://www.smallparts.com/ ]. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned on or before the termination date will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule.

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of California. If you are not currently a resident of California, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here [ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/your-account/payee-info.html ]. And if you relocate to another state in the near future please contact us [ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact?subject=&ie=UTF8 ] for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.

To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to offer the Associates Program to California residents and will not affect their ability to purchase from Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/ ], Endless.com [ http://www.endless.com/ ], MYHABIT.COM [ http://www.myhabit.com/ ] or SmallParts.com [ http://www.smallparts.com/ ].

We have enjoyed working with you and other California-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to California residents. We are also working on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available.

Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

——————————————————————————

This e-mail was sent to xxxx...@bkpark.com.

Please note that you must use this e-mail address to access your account in Associates Central or when contacting Associates Customer Service.

To manage your e-mail preferences, update your account settings [ http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/your-account/main.html ].

Message Category: Notice of Contract Termination Due to Potential New California Law

(c) 2011 Amazon.com. All rights reserved. Amazon.com is a registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com, 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109-5210, USA.

It theoretically affects me, not practically, because, well, I haven’t made any money through the program (I did try placing a few links on this website ). Well, I hope Amazon wins the war, if not these battles.

P.S. The email is technically copyrighted by Amazon.com; given the public nature, hopefully they don’t mind its publication, but if I take it down in the future … that would be because I received a cease-and-desist letter.

P.P.S. BTW, I technically have an address outside California that I can use … but I don’t think it’ll help; it’s in Connecticut.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters nationwide now expect their own taxes to go up during the Obama years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just nine percent (9%) expect their own taxes to go down.

Given how many people pay no income tax (I’ve heard figures around half, which is why it’s so easy to get support for increasing income tax: the half that do not pay tax vote to increase the tax on the other half that do!), it’s … interesting that so many people expect their tax to go up.

Granted, Rasmussen polls likely voters, not all adults or even registered voters, which probably means higher percentage of people polled by Rasmussen is likely to be paying tax, compared to the general population. But, even so, even the people in the lowest income bracket must be expecting some sort of tax increase to get that sort of poll results.

Well, let’s just hope that they are wrong. Or that they were thinking of increased taxes like cigarette tax (raised earlier this year) or that they have in mind things like VAT that Pelosi and her minions are thinking of (um, not that VAT is any better than increased income tax).

It is my hope that some of these people consider themselves liberals not willfully and consciously, but because they haven’t given the matter a good deal of thought—and because many people who had access to their malleable minds—i.e. teachers and professors—were liberals and didn’t have the sense not to corrupt the youth.

In this hope, I write here how I became a conservative. Perhaps some will see the validity of my point, and why, for the good of the greater whole, conservatism is a better philosophy than liberalism.

To be completely frank, I have not seriously considered my political identity until, well, until my junior or senior year in college. But I think a couple experiences in my youth laid the foundation for future decisions and thoughts. The first was a conversation with my youth pastor. It happened so long ago that all I remember now are, well, the conversation took place either when I was a sophomore or a junior in high school, and it took place when he was giving me a ride home from some church event. I don’t even remember why the topic came up, but he described the difference between Democrats and Republicans (and incidentally, why he’s a Republican): Democrats want to fix the society’s every problem with more government programs (and more taxes), and Republicans want to leave it to individuals (as well as their money). I don’t know if this made any sense to me back then, but this description—and it is a true description, I doubt even the hardcore liberal would dispute this characterization—was somehow impressed on my mind.

Then the other thing was the high school (well, it was AP) economics courses. I took both the microeconomics and macroeconomics. The one thing that laid the foundation for my conservative leaning was probably the effect of taxes covered in microeconomics course—how the tax, regardless of how it is levied, will be distributed according to elasticity of demand or supply curve, and how it will always result in dead weight, i.e. lost productivity. The macroeconomics course wasn’t so favorable to conservatives: it bashed Reagan’s supply-side economics and tax cuts as “Reaganomics” and offered very little criticism of Keynesians—not that I understand these topics fully now, given that I had no formal economics education since then.

Well, it looks like it will take rather long to finish this story, so I’ll just close for now with this thought: if you want to decide whether you are a conservative or a liberal, focus on this one issue: taxes. Are you willing to pay higher tax to benefit someone else—someone else that you do not know—or would you rather donate that same money to charity (or not at all)? If you choose the former, you may be a liberal. I would like to convince you that taxes are bad, even when the intentions are good, but, well, each to his own. If you choose the latter, you might be a conservative—please keep an open mind. Watch out for media and academic biases (these are fields that tilt heavily to the left, with notable exceptions like talk radio and some economists), trust your own logic above anything else, and verify all supposed facts with multiple sources.

Franklin was chosen for the report because it has the longest history in the state with a spending cap, said Gottlob, who is the principal of PolEcon Research of Dover and who considers himself a fiscal conservative. The report and its conclusion were meant to be non-political, although he acknowledged that the subject matter is inherently political.

“The expenditure cap in place in Franklin for nearly two decades has clearly resulted in lower levels of local government expenditures than comparable communities in New Hampshire,” the report began, adding that “the lower level of property tax-supported spending in Franklin is largely the result of lower spending on education, in part, because Franklin receives more state education aid per pupil than almost any other city in New Hampshire except Berlin.

How is the quality of education measured in the dollar amount of education spending? If I take a stack of $100 bills and set them on fire, in the name of education, and I make sure that it is entered as education spending in the accounting books, have I benefited the education system, or have I just burned money (and broken federal laws about not burning money)?

The excerpts from this utterly incomprehensible report continues with similar nonsense, such as that tax caps are “a race to the bottom”. I think I like that race to the bottom. As a resident of California, I would hope that Californian legislators would look at the outflow of their population and start offering more competitive local tax rates. I mean, it would be too late for me, but perhaps someone else will decide not to move out of California if the sales tax were, for one, no longer at the level of tithing.

I mean, are you better off with WalMart moving into your town—putting a downward pressure on price of everything—or with Starbucks moving into your town—putting upward pressure on price of coffee and increasing the supply of elitist assholes? How could it be worse for people to keep more of their own money? Are you hurt by the fact that you weren’t robbed at gunpoint today?

For what it’s worth, the residents of city of Franklin also do not comprehend this report:

The people of Franklin, said Merrifield, “are the best judge of the impact of the tax cap and they have lived with this the longest and I think that everybody in our community would say that we’re better off than before we adopted the tax cap.”

He said Franklin voters “have had numerous opportunities to remove the tax cap or alter it to allow for greater spending and the voters have routinely sided with the strictest interpretation. If we were to hold a referendum on this measure today, I would be very surprised to see it overturned.”

Remember this when some other sophist or tax-supported academic tries to tell you that more tax is good: the greatest accomplishments in this country, such as the invention of light bulb and the invention of automobile, happened at a time when there was zero (peacetime) federal income tax and very low local taxes. If we could do that with so little taxes, then less tax cannot possibly be so bad.