I used to enjoy flipping music instruments and recording gear online as a little side hustle but that all came to a grinding halt on Jan 1 2021. While I was quite disappointed, what about those who’s lives solely relied on online sales who went from an 8% tax rate to half overnight? What little profit they were making is now totally gone. Like every other musician I know, I was casually enjoying buying and selling musical equipment on Reverb for fun and was hit with a massive unexpected tax event this year. I instantly realized, “welp, this is over.” My heart goes out to those who had made this their livlihood. Uncle Sam has single-handedly strangled the life out of not only their source of side-income, but also hundreds of online arbitrage marketplaces like Reverb, Etsy and eBay who found that most people would rather stop selling online then give Uncle Sam HALF of the slim profits they were scraping together. For this reason, the CEO’s of over a dozen online marketplaces including those I just mentioned, have written an open letter to the government, pleading for reconsideration (you can add your name to this list by clicking the button below). Now is the time to act! Please take a moment to share your story below.
Some level-headed congress members and app CEO’s have written open letters to the IRS begging them to reconsider this attack on the American Public but so far the lawmakers have just doubled down on this atrocity.
I don’t think the IRS thought this through at all. In fact, it’s the shadiest thing I’ve ever seen the government do to the lower income American people in my lifetime. My heart goes out to those who had no other source of income, their revenue came to a screeching halt in January of 2021.
During Covid, many artists found news ways of staying afloat. Many musicians turned to flipping music gear online and Reverb because it is a place you can make 50-100k if you worked full time at it. I was one of those starving artists. In 2019 many people stopped spending money on websites, music and certainly paying live performers like myself. I do not have a storefront, I just flip gear out of my living room and was happy to find an alternative way to subsidize my income. Well, the IRS saw me and millions of other starving artists and said, “gimmegimmegimme.”
To step on lower class, lower income bottom 1% survivors, who were hit the hardest by Covid, is deplorable. To see musicians and artists as the “low hanging fruit” in this economic crisis we face is just evil.