Violent Video Game Tax May Become Law In 2014 In Many States|General Gaming Discussion|Forum|SNES HUB

Back in May of last year, vice President Joe Biden created quite a meltdown on Gaming Message forums across the world when he announced that Violent Videogames could legally be taxed. I remember being greatly amused and entertained by this. After all, since most Hardcore Gamers on the forums seemed to be business experts, it was now apparent that Hardcore gamers were also experts on the law as well. It was quite laughable watching all the hardcore gamers playing lawyers and issuing ‘arguments’ in their gaming message forum posts.

For my part in this, I reminded the Hardcore on Gamefaqs and Neogaf that most of them are not lawyers. Politicians are many things. But one things they are experts on is law. Most politicians are lawyers and all politicians deal with the law (legislators write law, justices interpret law, and executives execute the law). The only entity that gets to tell US Congress whether or not a law is legal or not is the US Supreme Court. And the US Supreme Court has said that they will not block Congress on any tax they make. People need to stop saying ‘Video games were ruled as speech. Congress can’t tax speech.’ It most certainly can. Porn is not prohibited and is defended as ‘free speech’. Yet, porn is taxed more.

What amused me is that these Hardcore refused to connect these dots with their own relationship to society. Taxing violent video games is a politically safe move because the people who play violent video games is a very small minority of the voting population. In fact, video game playing is a minority of the voting population as well. The more people that play games, the harder it would be for any game product to be specifically taxed. But the hardcore are so stupid, they viciously attacked any ‘expanding the gaming market’ move such as the Wii, which would make it much harder to tax video games. Why aren’t violent movies and books taxed? It is because everyone consumes or has consumed a violent movie or violent book. But very, very few voting age people have consumed a violent video game. It is not politically viable to specifically tax violent books or violent movies. It IS politically viable for cash-strapped governments to tax violent video games.

And so here we are. Just as our more hardcore friends did not understand the constitution, they often do not understand political trends, as it is hard to interpret the direction of the law when you spend all of your time consuming videogames and reading gaming message forums. The legal trend is for State Law to precede National Policy. States were finding solutions to Healthcare long before Obama’s Health Care law took effect. Smoking was discouraged at the state level long before the national government got in the game. And demands for minimum wage increases are always answered at the state level before a notional increase. It is the same with Tax and revenues. Oftentimes it is the states that find innovative taxation policies in order to fund their governments, which then later become national policy.  

Do all state trends become law? No. Most do not. But the fact that this law will likely pass in my home state, and is on the docket in many others suggests that it is a possibility that this may someday become a national law. If this occurs, then the Obamacare case establishes the precedent that Congress can essentially ‘tax’ whatever the hell it wants. The justices have even said they’re not going to go through thousands of pages of a bill to find out what is fair and what isn’t fair in the pieces and parts of it. A vidoegame tax would not be challenged as The Sitting Supreme Court says that NO TAX will be challenged.  

I confess that a Tax that targets Gratuitously violent games has some appeal in my mind, since most of these are played by hardcore gamers that are similar in this manner to snuff film enthusiasts; In that they seem to enjoy what normal society flees from.  One could argue that hardcore gamer practices vice just as those who engage too much in alcohol and Strip Clubs. A compelling interest argument could be made that hardcore gaming is a pox on society which should be discouraged for greater good. If such an argument was made they would get no objection from me.

Hell it might help gaming finally become more mainstream. In this cash-strapped economy, high-taxation can and does kill products by pushing them JUST out of range. Perhaps then we would see game developers of violent games stop being such freaks and make a product that is more acceptable to society. Then we may finally see some substance over style in this industry…