So as stated, you enter the club, pay a cover – that gets the showtax added on. You sit in the main room, tip at the rail, no showtax, it’s a tip not a sale. Go for a VIP section/private room and have to prepay a VIP/private room fee to get in: showtax applies.(*) But they don’t discuss what happens if you do not rent a private room or pay to go into the VIP area but get table dances right in the room at $25 per, paid at the end. Also they don’t go into whether if the dancers are private contractors who pay to dance, could there be a taxation on the housefee or the club’s share. I can imagine clubs tacking it on there.

(*)I’m not familiar with what’s the private room practice in Upstate NY, whether they use the NY City system where you pay a full rate to the club, and they then settle with the dancer, or the system used in other parts of the country where the customer pays one amount to the club just for “the room” and separately pays the dancer for the dance itself.

I was *thrilled* to read the dissenting opinion. The author and I were in agreement on his two major points:
1) The applicable law as it’s written now is too vague.
2) Choreography does not equal dance.

I agree with the effective result of the decision insofar as it does not give tax-exempt status to Nite Moves.
Taxes are taken by the government, which [theoretically] turns them into public capital: assets like transportation systems, domestic law & order, and utilities which are the necessary infrastructure to support a capitalist economy. Most individuals [including corporations if you see them as such] would not be able to afford to lay their own roads or hire a sufficient police or military force to defend their interests.

Tax exemptions exclude individuals or corporations from certain designated tax statutes, like those imposed on entertainment income, or liquor, or wages. They are not absolute exceptions.

After reading the relevant code, it seems obvious to me that the spirit of the exemption law is to lessen the required financial contribution to public capital for those who are contributing other [non-financial] assets to public capital. Charitable organizations contribute to domestic law & order [which lessens the need for government spending on police & courts] by providing for those in dire poverty who would likely otherwise turn to crime.

The [inadequate] definition of “arts performance” specifies only “dramatic or musical” rather than taking the time to specifically define something like “educational arts.”
Education is a part of public capitol, and academics overwhelmingly agree that incorporating certain *ordered* [not choreographed] artistic experiences helps us develop our creative thinking: our innovation and problem-solving [capitalist] skills.
Ballet, for example, consists of ordered performances. If any two observers, who are basically familiar with the elements/structure/history of ballet, both see the same performance of a ballet that neither has seen before or has any outside information about… they will agree on a certain amount of interpretation of the performance: the events, the characters, whether it was a romantic tragedy or an impression of a dying swan.
To put on a ballet performance the performers first have to learn ballet within the confines it’s established as an art, and has created its own economy of schools and apparel and more. Skills like ballet also make our students more marketable to the best schools, which improves the quality of our labor force and creates more entrepreneurs.

Leaving out the fact that ballet also provides entertainment and amusement and therefore should not be tax-exempt by the letter of the law…
the spirit seems to emphasize intellectual/academic discipline and development over “pure” entertainment… (which must contain something entertaining, like dancing…)
…and I have not yet worked in a club I would consider more intellectually beneficial than fun.

The longer I think about this the less sure I am that I actually approve of the Right Thing being done for the Wrong Reason.

Yes, it is true that just because tens of thousands of people do the Macarena in a baseball stadium, that doesn’t not qualify the baseball club for tax exemption.

However, they’re enforcing their current standards arbitrarily within their own definitions…

..and possibly worst of all, they appear to have possibly overlooked the fact that:
-if Nite Moves follows the industry practice of having customers pay dancers directly for dances – which would seem to be necessary if their dancers, like most of us, are Independent Contractors-
-having our dances declared artistic performances which are tax exempt would actually mean that the dancer didn’t have to pay taxes on them,
-but the club, who is receiving money from the dancer in exchange for providing the building/bouncers/music/advertising/etc. would still be making their money off the dancer.

Or maybe there’s something I’m missing?
I’ve been steamy about this for a while…
Obvie.

I do agree that the derision is weird and out of place. I mean, it wasn’t even as if it was the dancers claiming the discount. Why are we referring to them so dismissively? You have a club owner trying to exploit what appears to him to be a loophole in the law. Wow. Nobody not in the adult industry has EVER DONE THAT BEFORE.