DRAWING A LINE
Deck stacked vs. entrepreneurs
Dear John: I loved the story in your Jan. 5 column about the 8year-old girl selling her drawings on the subway. But writing about it could have severe repercussions.
1. The city will insist that she needs a permit to run this business, which will take months to get, even if they will actually give one to someone her age.
2. Then she will need to apply for an IRS employer identification number for her business, unless she will be filing taxes as a sole proprietorship.
3. She will also need a sales tax ID from the city/state.
4. Then she will have to be prepared to pay herself the new minimum wage or else she will hear from Gov. Cuomo’s minimum wage law.
So, while you did a nice thing by taking one of her very reasonably priced drawings, by the time the government is done with her, any entrepreneurship she has will have been wiped out and she will be encouraged to be just another person going through life on welfare and other programs, which are easier to deal with than running a business. S.B.
Dear S.B.: And I thought I was just suspending my usual cynicism and telling a nice story for the New Year.
Damn, government! And those kids probably didn’t even pay to get on the subway. Dear John: In November, I flew from San Francisco to New York. I used the Virgin America kiosk to print my boarding pass in San Francisco. When I swiped my credit card, I received two printed tickets.
One of them was for another person with the same name on another flight at a later time that day.
I asked a Virgin America representative standing nearby how this happened and she told me it was a common occurrence. She advised meto discard the other person’s ticket. I kept it and reported the matter to the corporate office. I’m enclosing copies of both tickets.
I think the ticketing software corruption could be a sign of hackers or terrorists leading to sabotage the flight.
By the way, I have not yet re- ceived a response from Virgin and it has been more than a year. Flyers need confidence in their airline. Can you help with this? J.P.
Dear J.P.: I sure can help. I’m going to publish your letter and then see if Virgin America responds.
The plea to say something when you see something does no good if the person you are saying it to is deaf to the problem. Virgin America, your turn. Virgin assured The Post that there was no threat from the double ticketing.
An airline spokesman said the Department of Transportation — which the reader contacted —“ultimately determined there was no security risk involving the guest’s personal information. This has also been verified by our IT and Security teams.”
And it said this was “not an instance of software corruption.” Virgin added, “Thousands of guests fly Virgin America every day, and occasionally — as occurred in this case — two people with the same name travel on the same day.