colortwist

Tax insanity

Added 2020-06-12 05:42:10 +0000 UTC

So I really have no idea what's going on with this tax stuff on Patreon.

Near as I can tell, someone somewhere decided digital goods are somehow "tangible" and should thus be taxed accordingly. I suppose this makes sense to a certain extent, though I can't say that I agree with the idea of some phantom federal entity collecting tax on my behalf just because they believe they have a right to. I'm not doing this stuff to make other people money (whom presumably have enough of it already)- I'm just trying to squeak by myself and potentially turn this into a viable career path if at all possible because it really is something that I enjoy doing.

Anyways...

Since I don't really offer anything that isn't already posted on DA in some form (with the exception of the occasional image pack), I've listed all my tiers as "general support" for the time being- because I think that's the best label for what's going on here.

As far as I know, this should mean that any pledges to my account will not be taxed- but I can't guarantee that because Patreon doesn't explicitly tell you how the various "benefits" that they offer are actually taxed. I suspect that's actually on purpose to prevent people from picking the options that save their customers the most amount of money, since that was certainly my first thought when I heard about all of this ("what do I have to click to opt out of all this crap?").

In any case, I will post another update here if I need to change things again in the future so everyone has a vague idea of what to expect as far as the pledge costs are concerned. Unfortunately there's not much else I can do about this ATM, since it seems to be a very complicated problem that I don't have a whole lot of control over.