On Over 260 Pounds? Start Walking
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On A Brief, Opinionated History of Taxes in America
Silver lining: this isn't a germane issue for most of the contributors in the Awl Network.
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On Online Journalism "A Bad Business So Far," Say Slideshow Manufacturers
Paying contributors must be brutal on the bottom line.
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On The Internet Talks To The Internet About The Internet, Makes Fun Of You
Does this mean it's safe to subtweet @dluogylime again?
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On The Five Worst Kinds of Co-Workers
If you are unhappy with Balk's work ethic, just tell him.
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On What Exactly Does New York City Offer Tech Startups Besides High Taxes?
@lurk If you made $1.34MM last year ("Your MCTMT due is .34% (.0034) of your total net earnings from self-employment allocated to the MCTD for the tax year.") you probably should be set up as a C-Corp.
The other tax you are referring to is a Sales Tax for purchases. Some of which are legitimately due, though at this point, you can pretty confidently check off no tax due since almost all vendors shipping to NY addresses charge sales tax.
There is also the Unincorporated NYC tax, which yeah, sucks (still a deduction against your fed, tho). But per the title of this post, does not affect incorporated businesses.
Aside from running a business, I also reported as a sole proprietor for several years. The two worst hits were self-employment tax (which is a Federal issue) and the incorporated tax, which does suck. But once you make over $175K a year, the costs of organizing (S-Corp fees, acct, etc.) provide enough benefit (including self-employment tax) to eat the cost. It's about 2-4K a year in costs to run your life as a S-Corp as a freelancer, but worth it.
Unless of course you are going to dredge up some usenet thread about how Unkie Same took every self employed libertarian programmer asshole to the woodshed in 1997 blah blah blah.
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On What Exactly Does New York City Offer Tech Startups Besides High Taxes?
>Structured pooling of professional resources, like payroll.
Um, isn't this just ADP? $7 a month per full time employee? How much more help do you want? Expense is deductible against revenue.
>Assistance with small-team health insurance.
This is a national, not local issue. Try insuring your team in a state that doesn't require coverage of everyone and allows individual underwriting. It's much worse. Also 100% deductible against revenue.
You really want tax help with key man insurance? I guess maybe if you would sign on to paying for 100% of your labor costs I could get behind this, but you want the city of New York to help you get a $1 million when Balk's well advertised smoking and drinking habits to catch up to him so you can continue to not pay people for their labor?
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On What Exactly Does New York City Offer Tech Startups Besides High Taxes?
You need to fire your accountant. What taxes is NYC making you pay? Rent tax got phased out in the 90s. S or C corp tax is like $500 a year if you show no profit (you should be paying out any corporate profit in the form of salary to the owners, or profit sharing, or, you know, 'contributors'). Unemployment taxes are paid to the state. NYC City tax comes out of the employee end (which is a deduction against revenue anyway). Any sales tax should be charged off to person writing you a check.
I ran a profitable small business for six years in NYC and literally cannot remember a single instance where I had to write a tax check that would not have required in any other locale in the country.
Do you need some help with the math?
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On Advertising and The Future of the Less-Evil Internet
"They like to give advertising a bad rap while not paying contributors, generally."