Congress recently passed a $1.9 trillion relief effort, the most expensive bill in the history of the country. As a result, the federal account is going to need a considerable influx of cash, and the much-loathed 1-percent can’t (read: won’t) front this kind of tax haul all by their lonesome. A realist middle-classer should probably be bracing for Uncle Sam to start pocketing an increased cut of their monthly earnings. But seeing as how any tax jump on this treasured voting bloc is a bipartisan no-no, I’d like to offer an alternative source of new funding. It’s called: Tax the porn.
We don’t talk too much about vices anymore. But looking around, the concept could use a comeback. Merriam-Webster’s defines vice as “a moral fault or failing,” but it can also mean something close to the opposite: “a habitual and usually trivial defect or shortcoming.” There are those who find great moral hazard in the very existence of pornography, and there are others who simply wish they (or a loved one) were not losing such a great deal of time and energy to a worthless habit. Personally, I’d fall much more in with the first crowd. But I’m looking to part you from your money, and will therefore save the moral argument for another day.
If you’re under the age of 40, you got to grow up in an era that decided America’s biggest vice came in the form of slender nicotine sticks. Smoking cigarettes is indeed wretched for your health, and our loud, sprawling, angry, arguing nation managed to, at last, agree to acknowledge this fact in the ‘90s. Goodbye James Dean and Charlie Parker, Audrey Hepburn and Janis Joplin. Cool kids blow their lungs on foul-smelling cigs no longer!
And like the bygone heyday of cigarette insouciance, the real truth about porn is today obscured.
|
By the time I made it to college, producing a joint would get you less judgment than pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights out of your purse. In keeping with millennial stereotypes, young adults circa 2001 voiced their disapproval of smoking via kind and earnest pleas for the smoker to consider her own health and wellbeing. (Farm-to-table and Wes Anderson are the logical next step on this trajectory, yes.)
At any rate, the relentless PSAs worked. Smoking rates declined, especially amongst the young. A side tactic, one favored by government accountants everywhere, was to progressively hike the tax up on a pack of cigarettes, making the act of smoking ever less economically appealing, even impossible. Try nursing a regular habit when it costs $13 and change every day. The rate of young person smoking plummeted by 68 percent between 1991 and 2017, and we can assign some of that decrease to the general state of broke-ness that envelops your average tender-aged 18-year-old upon graduation.
Smokers were not hated. No one spat on them (unless, maybe, you were in Boulder). The habit itself just grew outmoded, casually disliked, generally rejected. It hurt the smoker, but second-hand smoke could also harm the health of an innocent bystander, and for all involved parties, the stank of indoor-smoking pushed the habit outdoors entirely. It was expensive and socially costly; lo and behold, people just quit doing it.
Now, consider porn. Like smoking, it provides a temporary, immediate kind of physical pleasure for the partaker. Like cigarettes once did, porn enjoys a tacit cultural endorsement. We don’t talk bluntly about porn, and when it does come up, it is usually presented as a widespread, benign kind of “subversive” hobby. Just think back to any Judd Apatow movie you’ve seen, ever. Giggle, giggle. Wink, wink.
And like the bygone heyday of cigarette insouciance, the real truth about porn is today obscured. As Julia Long reported for The Washington Post, mainstream porn is relentlessly geared toward reinforcing the worst stereotypes of toxic masculinity and rape culture. A normal, healthy society would be capable of talking honestly about this, but we all know where we’re currently living, plus I did promise to leave the moralizing aside.
And I’m really here for the kids.
There was a time when cigarette ads used to target minors. Like the weaselly tobacco rep Nick Naylor put it in Thank You for Smoking, “If I can convince just one of these kids to pick up smoking, I’ve paid for my flight round trip.” Corporations know their customer growth depends on hooking the next generation as early as possible. (Tech giants regularly send school districts class device sets free of charge, and they’re not doing it for the warm fuzzies.) Would we tolerate Big Tobacco passing out cigarettes for free? What if the fat cats were direct-mailing out their product, packaged specifically to appeal to children and young teens? That’s how porn works now. Mandatory taxation would ensure only the 18+ crowd could access porn, which (neat trick) happens to be the law anyway.
Think, oh reader (oh elected politician!), on the potential tax bonanza here: Porn sites get more traffic than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. Combined!
|
But what about “FREE SPEECH!” Sure. But porn is a particular kind of speech, one that is already heavily censored in a variety of ways. And its niche place within the First Amendment might be better understood in light of how we’ve handled the Second.
Americans have the right to keep and bear arms, but there are restrictions (perhaps not enough, but stay with me). Background checks and age requirements exist nationwide, recognizing as we do that owning a gun is a responsibility no child can consent to carry. Gun sales are taxed, sometimes at rather exorbitant rates. You can debate the merits of these policies on the margins, and you can lament that the current slate of regulations has failed spectacularly to prevent mass shootings. But the fact remains that non-felon adults who want to get a gun can do so. The law requires they be at least somewhat motivated — proactive, we might call it. That’s all.
What’s the big deal with asking seekers of porn to likewise put some of their own skin in the game? Require a credit card for any porn access online and your underage, broke, and otherwise lazy porn watchers pretty much disappear. In every case, that’s a net good for them and for society at large.
But what about the porn makers, some will cry. What about their speech rights?
Devoted Ayn Randians might remember that our laws don’t allow public copulation. One of the reasons is the real problem this would pose for children. Certainly, you’d be in legal trouble should you attempt to exercise this particular mode of speech in the private residence of a minor.
And yet, that’s about what our current unregulated internet allows. Parents can do a few things to mitigate this, but the situation is pretty Sisyphean. The power of just one kid — at school, football practice, math camp, nextdoor — with access to a smartphone and free WiFi helps explain why the average age of first exposure to porn is about 11.
Requiring taxation on internet pornography — and imposing strict fines on sites and even broadband carriers that offer porn for free — would go a very long way to ensure kids get a childhood.
It would also help ensure they get a financially stable nation when they’ve aged into the raucous world of adulthood.
Think, oh reader (oh elected politician!), on the potential tax bonanza here: Porn sites are more frequented than Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix combined. Combined! That’s a cargo fleet of potential dollars that could go toward infrastructure week, Social Security, Medicare, even early childhood education! It’s a lot of money! Don’t you want it??
The porn lobby has plenty of money to swat away government snoops, and our tech friends would likewise prefer to keep D.C. regulators on permanent East Coast lockdown.
|
Contra the utopian navel gazing from some of our Silicon Valley friends, information has never been free, and in fact, it shouldn’t be. This pernicious idea is largely responsible for the decimated economic state of several industries, journalism and the music biz chief amongst them. Most editors, reporters, and mid-level musicians can tell you what an average bank statement looks like when certain kinds of work are essentially labeled “free labor” by The Internet™.
Note that Zuck & Co. are more than happy to accept the big bucks from companies seeking to advertise on their platforms. Advertisements are also a form of information, but — of course! — not of the sort our enlightened tech bros want to socialize. And so should it be with porn.
Requiring that adult content be taxed acknowledges the work and actual cost involved in producing it. That content as labor-intensive as porn can be accessed for free seems like its own separate ethical conundrum.
Bills that require some kind of porn tax have recently been introduced in several states already, though none has gotten far down the road toward becoming actual law. The porn lobby has plenty of money to swat away government snoops, and our tech friends would likewise prefer to keep D.C. regulators on permanent East Coast lockdown. Palo Alto currently enjoys the self-rule of a de facto independent state, our own little god-free version of Vatican City, where tech bro proclamations are issued as fiat, and the rest of us poor serf peons destined to accept the never-to-be-questioned FAANG (appropriate) dictats. And the tech bros have declared their vision: a zippy, open internet controlled only by them.
But 57 percent of the country still deems porn immoral, Joe Biden & Co. are in desperate need of serious cash money, and unending deference to our tech titans has got to end sometime. No time like the present.
So how about we call a vice a vice, bank some meaningful funds from it, and help float our government on to live another day? Let’s do this, America. Let’s tax the hell out of porn.
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want a deeper connection with our community, please join us as a Premium Member today.
Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: