Copyright 2000 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
SECTION: PREPARED TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 542 words
HEADLINE:
PREPARED TESTIMONY OF BURR MORSE PRESIDENT MORSE FARM SUGAR WORKS
BEFORE THE SENATE COMMERCE, SCIENCE AND TRANSPORTATION
COMMITTEE
SUBJECT - S.2255
BODY:
Thank you for allowing me to testify today. My name is Burr Morse and
my business is the Morse Farm Sugar Works in Montpelier, Vermont.
I am a
diversified farmer with roots back to the late 1700s in Central Vermont.
Diversification is necessary because maple sugar making is a seasonal activity
that lasts but one month out of twelve, and that is on a good year. To
supplement the income derived from gathering and boiling down forty gallons of
sugar maple sap to get one single gallon of Vermont maple syrup, I grow crops
and host tourists in my sugar house. In any given year, one to four percent of
our fifty thousand visitors become mail order customers by placing orders over
the phone and by mail from our annual catalog or newsletters. In 1999 we
expanded our sales program into the electronic media market by publishing a web
site to increase the reach of our print and broadcast advertising. The site
required an investment of $6000.00 and incurs monthly fees of a
minimum of $225.00.
The response to the quality and
uniqueness of our site has been overwhelming and brings me to these proceedings
today. I have been able to document visits to the Morse Farm that have resulted
directly from the web, and we are enjoying some success with on-line orders. In
real terms, however, our web presence is a long term investment and not a
panacea for the uneven cash flow generated by a seasonal business like ours.
I encourage you all to visit www.morsefarm.com on the internet but
please recognize that it is not a dot-com business that is likely to appear on
the Nasdaq charts one day. It is a way for me to better serve my customers to
assure their loyalty to my Vermont product. It is a new "crop", if you will, in
a field that without time to grow, will not provide a harvest. I submit that a
moratorium on taxation of internet sales until 2006 is the very minimum of what
traffic will bear.
My business is threatened daily by mega-mergers in
the food, travel, and mail order industries. Big business has won the battle and
without an affordable way to communicate with customers who want traditional
products, I can not compete. If afforded the opportunity of nurturing this new
field that is the Internet, I might be able to recoup my original investment and
find a little stability in a dynamic marketplace. If and when I make money on my
investments, I pay taxes on those profits.Talk of taxing
sales over the Internet affects me times two.
My father told a story about sending the hired man out into the woods one day to
check on how fast the sap was dripping. He returned to exclaim, "Mr. Morse, I
counted eighteen drops between the end of the spout and the bottom of the
bucket!" Now either he was seeing drops that were not there or he could count
faster than a Pentium chip. Anyone who supports the concept of taxing sales made
over the Internet is seeing imaginary profits and could, for short term gain,
rain a new and up-and-coming market.
No, it will still take forty
gallons of sap to create one naturally sweet gallon of maple syrup in the year
3000 but if taxed forty ways, nobody will be making the effort and nobody will
even recognize the taste that came out of New England all those years ago.
END
LOAD-DATE: April 13, 2000
