The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Taxing Porn in California

Back in February, California Assembly member Charles Calderon proposed levying a 25% tax on porn. Calderon’s Assembly Bill 2914 would have added a quarter of the sales price to your favorite dildo, porn DVD or copy of Hustler, not to mention any dirty download you purchase within California from anyone doing business within the state of California. That bill has just died in committee.

Hooray for a well-deserved death, I say, and I hope it was agonizingly painful. But the very fact that such a tax could be proposed is, to put it mildly, a little creepy to me. As a lifelong Democrat now used to hearing anti-porn tirades from Republicans, I find the fact that Calderon is a member of no organized party infuriating. It recalls for me the glory days of the ’80s when you were as likely to see attacks on porn from the left as from the right.

Calderon claimed that the law would generate hundreds of millions in tax revenue, which the state could use to mitigate the “secondary effects” of the porn industry. Calderon’s Chief of Staff Tom White was quoted in UC Davis’s paper, the Cal Aggie as claiming “There is a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse in the industry, STDs, mental health problems and pregnancies. The industry is such that oftentimes people get burned through and come out with nothing, no job skills or education, so they need job training or state services.”

Similarly, Stephen Yagielowicz’s XBiz article on the bill’s defeat quotes Diane Duke of the Free Speech Coalition: people called by Calderon to testify before committee “were telling lies about the industry; that people were committing suicide and that drugs were rampant on the set.”

Hey, I’m all for state services being available to porn performers, but the very idea that “the industry” leaves people burned out and messed up after a period of making between $200 and $3000 for a few hours’ work seems pretty suspect to me. Plenty of former porn performers are indeed scarred and messed up by their time in the biz; so are plenty of former temps, and they make $15 an hour if they’re lucky. And does targeting sexual speech in order to generate cash for phantom services the State does not provide really fall within the boundaries of reasonable government? Of course not, and commentators from the right of center to the pro-porn-but-anti-bad porn lobby agree, for wildly differing reasons — as do members of the Assembly. That’s probably why the bill died such an ignominious death — which pretty much everyone expected it to, maybe even Calderon.

Then why did someone like Charles Calderon introduce such a bill? Calderon, in 1988-89, was part of the “Gang of Five,” a group of conservative Democrats who tried to stage a hostile takeover of the California Assembly from then Speaker (later San Francisco Mayor and current mayor Gavin Newsom’s mentor) Willie Brown. Calderon then served as the first Latino Senate Majority Leader in the California State Senate. Now back in the Assembly, it’s pretty clear that he’s bucking for the conservative pro-family vote in an era when many conservative groups feel Republicans aren’t anti-porn enough — or more accurately, aren’t effectively anti-porn enough. The recent assertions by “pro-family” groups that the Feds should prosecute “mainstream obscenity” goes hand in glove with this kind of attitude; the porn industry itself is what these forces object to, not any particular kind of porn.

But if you’re going to start pointing fingers at industries that cause problems, you’ve got a long list of products that cause more trackable and concrete problems than porn. Take the alcohol industry — which does business in an area not protected by the First Amendment. That’s the principle behind San Rafael’s Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog group that tries to publicize the costs of alcohol abuse, from drunk driving to underage drinking to disease and lost work days. I’m far from stoked about jacking up alcohol taxes for a lot of reasons: the specific damages are ill-documented, the industry is already regulated, alcohol taxes amount to a poor tax and if you’re going to be jacking up poor taxes, why stop with alcohol? Let’s tax the chips and soft drinks and other processed crap they sell at liquor stores in poor neighborhoods where residents don’t have cars to hit the nearest Whole Foods for some organic arugula, capiscio?

But my principle objection to a porn tax is actually not affected by my love of porn, or the fact that I make my living working in the porn industry. Rather, I object to a porn tax because porn is legal. Calderon and his cronies claim porn does damage, fine — prove it. Then introduce a bill to outlaw, not regulate it. But if the government doesn’t have the political will to outlaw an industry, proposing crippling and bizarre taxes is ultimately nothing more than an attempt for do-gooders to make an end-run around the mores of the majority. Porn could never realistically be outlawed in the US. Pointing to ill-defined and in many cases fraudulent “secondary effects” is ridiculous.

This sort of thing reminds me of an ill-advised lawsuit filed by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, late in the Clinton years. HUD sued gun manufacturers on behalf of people who lived in federal housing projects, because those people were getting killed by guns. Back up a minute — the federal housing projects were funded by HUD. HUD was unable or unwilling to ensure that they were safe. So they sued gun manufacturers. Weird.

Peoples’ reaction to the HUD gun lawsuit of the late ’90s invariably reflect their opinion on gun rights and the supposed right to bear arms in the Second Amendment. Similarly, attitudes toward Calderon’s Porn Tax are governed by peoples’ ideas about porn. It’s reassuring to me that the bill was so overwhelmingly criticized — almost nobody seemed to like it. But the mere fact that Calderon got his claims out there in front of legislators and the general public is a bad sign.

People have once again heard the impossible to prove but difficult to disprove claims that porn does abstract damage. Next time free speech advocates have to face down another lunatic like Calderon, some people will remember those claims and won’t remember, or won’t accept, their totally unsupported and unsupportable nature. Every half-assed feint by pro-censorship groups has the potential to do damage. Let’s hope Calderon’s doesn’t do too much.

Thomas Roche blogs about spanking, Dungeons & Dragons, and South Ossetia at www.thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.