A TEXAS-SIZED REACH

This is a little strange but I'll try to explain it briefly. The City of San Antonio is suing the on-line booking services like Expedia and Travelocity for "lost" hotel tax revenues. The logic works like this: The services pay a wholesale amount for blocks of rooms; That's what the operator gets paid for the room. The services then mark the rooms up a little bit and book them on line. The difference between what the service pays for the room plus its costs of operation and what the operator gets paid is called "profit"; The money that actually lands in San Antonio is the lower, wholesale amount. that's what the property pays hotel tax on; San Antonio wants the services to cough up the tax on the difference between the wholesale and web-charged prices of the rooms, saying it lost something like 1.9M on the profit.

OK, that's a legal theory, I guess. If you're the attorney for the city, how do you prove that, but for the web service, the guest would be staying in San Antonio AT ALL? I'm guessing it would be easy for a hired propeller-head to create an economic model that shows the services actually ENHANCED the tax revenues of San Antonio. Now throw in the money those internet-enabled guests spend in beautiful Bexar County and you've got a wealth creation model. Hard case for the City to prove.

I mean, come on, You got a basketball team and a Burn Center (nobody really wants to have to go to a Burn Center). You moved the knifings off of the Riverwalk and the prostitutes out from in front of the Alamo, destroyed a historic golf course and built some overpriced bumpty-humpty-dumpty golf course resorts/developments. Just be glad you have people coming into your city and leave bargaining for room rates in the private sector.

Surely, there are some Repubs out there who agree with me on this one!