Who Will Collect Income Tax in Space?

If you tax at point of source I can see certain European Nations getting a lot of Tax Registrations - bit like running Liberian registered vessels in the Merchant Navy. I would guess the rules would have to work in a pretty similar way. This would I guess extend to crew and safety regulations - unless someone is proposing an all encompassing agency.

We would have to probably have something similar to the Geneva Congress on Commercial Airflight / Law of the Sea conference to decide the absolutes of the rules.

From an economic prospective, space travel is expensive enough as it is, taxes on the companies that are brave enough to invest money and personal into this new ecenomic opputunity will lead to slower growth and higher prices for the consumers. Should these brave pioneers be able to avoid taxes? I think so.

Originally posted by zorgon

But the IRS is going to have a tough time taxing the profits "out there" . I suppose for the moon we will just "take" the land we need...

Not a chance, not you, not American, not Jewish.
Space and moon don't belong to you!

Well what you do is set up a seperate government on the moon, it then creates states, territories, whatever, collects the taxes from there, and the earth collects taxes from the moon as a whole.

Its the same idea that the Persian Kings used at the time of Darius and Xerxes. Worked perfectly.