Effects of Pole Tax

‘Pole Tax’ presented by The Texas House of Representatives aims at enforcing a bill, which seeks to tax adult entertainment nightclubs. The surcharge will apply to any visit to the club, and should increase the generated revenue by an estimate of 40 million. The revenue generated will find use in funding rape counseling and services for the victims. As a result, this will reduce instances of sexual assault and assist sex crimes victims. The driving force that initiated this idea is that there is a link between the nude dancers’ performance offered in the nightclubs and sexual offences. Although there is no clear relationship between the two concepts, the idea was presented based on intuitive reasoning (Slemrod, 2008). As expected, club owners raised an objection since the bill was merely punitive to their business ventures.

The main reason for offering nightclub entertainment is to provide adult leisure. As a result, the tax imposition would hinder businesses and on the extreme end force some ventures to quit the market. Regardless of whether the idea of helping rape victims is excellent or not, this concept would still result in adverse outcomes. This implies that dancers, bouncers, and bartenders will risk losing their jobs. Within this in mind, it is difficult to define the relationship between sex crimes and strips clubs (Weir, 2007). Similarly, since there is no scientific proof that people who go to adult clubs are prompted to commit sex crimes, the matter loses the point concerning the factors addressed in the bill.

Based on the arguments presented by the legislators, they demonstrate that adult clubs, especially those that engage in strip dancing and sex crimes, exhibit similar characteristics of objectifying women. Without further analysis of this idea, the majority of state representatives concurred with the concept. Generally, although these facilities engage in somehow offensive practices in the eyes of the many, they have their own corporate social responsibility such as charity funding through activities like car washing. Thus, the move advocated by the bill will adversely affect the club owners since despite offering legal services, punitive measures are taken against them (Truly, 2004).

On real terms, the club owners’ services are legal and have vital importance to the clients. Although the majority may view it as an intuition to eroticism, the services offer a form of refreshment with exposure to reality. Contrary to the argument that it leads some people to seek for sex, it in fact plays a critical role in imparting the need for self-control to the clients. Additionally, the service offers considerable opportunities for most people so that they can improve their living standards. Essentially, so long as there is no abuse of an individual’s rights, the business conduct is within its right path and it does not warrant any subjective punitive measures against it (Austin,1996).

In comparison to other states that have adopted similar policies like Illinois and New York with 4 and 10 dollars surcharge respectively on each admission the policies have been unsuccessful. They have considerably hampered business in these states and led to massive job losses. Although the arguments for such ideas are almost similar, they do not portray the offences that the particular players contribute to sex crimes. Considering observation that most sexual assaults do not occur within the premises, but outside the jurisdiction of the club owners, other factors prompt people to get into the vice. Repeatedly, the victims of the vice are reported to have been influenced by other factors apart from the scenes or mentality gained in the nightclubs. This implies therefore that the move to implement the bill will cause more harm than good to the major players of the club business. Moreover, since most individuals will be forced out of the business, the state will likely decline in its general revenue compared to the revenue of other states that do not embrace the policy.