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Pay To Have Your Phone Tapped
An anonymous reader writes "The Globe and Mail is running an interesting story over who should carry the cost of wiretapping (registration may be required): 'Canada's police chiefs propose a surcharge of about 25 cents on monthly telephone and Internet bills to cover the cost of tapping into the communications of terrorists and other criminals.'"
Here's a version of the article with no registration required.
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On top of this, there is also a $2.95 Telus long distance administration charge. This charge I'm told is for using Telus's long distance service, regardless if I make any long distance calls. I hear that if I switch long distance carriers, this administration charge increases.
They could easily add a $0.25 "security enhancement" charge to my phone bill.
The difference of course is that normal taxes are progressive, the richer you are, the more you pay.
You misunderstand the regular meaning of "progressive tax". A so-called "progressive tax" charges the wealthy a higher percentage, so they pay a higher rate. Most income taxes are like this. Most rich people pay much more income tax than the poor. Many poor people pay no income tax.
Flat taxes charge everyone the same rate - sales taxes and property taxes are usually like this. The wealthy still pay more than the poor, since they usually buy more and own more valuable property.
Poll or head taxes charge a constant amount per person. Everyone pays the same fee to get a passport.
Seriously, dude; admit you didn't RTFA.
Because if you had, you would know that the phone company doesn't want to "jack up prices" to cover the costs. Or the "supposed" costs as you say (you doubt that there are real costs involved?).
But the country's largest phone company believes that telecommunications firms and law-enforcement agencies, not subscribers, should split the costs.
"We think there should be more of a partnership between the agencies and us, rather than getting the public to pay for it," said Bell Canada spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis.
That your post got modded informative just proves that not only did YOU not RTFA, every person who gave you a point didn't either. Pathetic.
It's for obvious reasons that the phone company doesn't want to have their subscribers cover the costs. I guess this wouldn't be obvious if you have a anti-capitalism chip the size of Ottawa on your shoulder though...
In my opinion, this is precisely what taxes are for (as opposed to, for example, funding methadone clinics for ne'er do wells).
That happened in Germany two years ago :-)
Some customers of the mobile phone provider "O2" got bills with a lot of "outgoing voicemail" connections to one certain telephone number.
That number was used by the authorities to record the customers calls - so warning the suspects that they were under observation.
According to some spokesperson of "O2" the reason was an erroneous software update.
Two year old (german)article at heise.de and a follow up.
He's talking about the Liberal party, not "liberals". Big huge difference dude.
Nope, this is a proposal by Canadian police chiefs. We don't have patriotism here....we have "at least we're not americans".
That wasn't Arlo, that was his dad Woody.
I agree with the spirit of your post. In the United States, however, this generation (that is, the children of the baby boomers, those just entering the workforce in their early twenties) will be the first to be worse off financially on average than the previous.
That is to say, throughout the course of US history, there has been a net increase in standard of living with every generation, except for ours. I'm speaking in averages here, as obviously extreme punctuations like the great depression caused rather low standards of living for particular generations -- but only temporarily.