Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

Re:Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to... by karma_vaccum123 on Sunday August 21, 2016 @01:11AM (#12329489)

> but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs.

Yet the government watches small businesses fail all the time with nothing more than an offer of unemployment insurance.

Why should the government have a special care for taxis but no special care for a pizza parlor that goes under? Do they offer to retrain the workers with more advanced appliances?

In this case, it is merely the threat of competition! This is truly amazing.

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Re:Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to... by giaour on Sunday August 21, 2016 @01:26AM (#12329534)

Unlike an individual pizza parlor, the taxi fleet in a given city plays an important role in policy planning. Public transit planning takes taxi service into account, and taxis are barred in many locales from refusing medically necessary transportation. Taxis have obligations that go above and beyond those imposed on a generic livery provider, and as such governments might be reluctant to let a few livery providers outcompete taxis into extinction.

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Re:Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to... by zaidf on Sunday August 21, 2016 @02:01AM (#12329628)

Isn't that just kicking the can down the road? Wouldn't the government be better served revising the plan to take new innovation into account than instituting a tax purely to slow down innovation?

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Re:Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to... by threesixandnine on Monday August 22, 2016 @12:20PM (#12337376)

Too much work man.

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