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Taxes On Cell Phones Hit All-Time High

Posted by timothy on from the what-the-tax-market-will-bear dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "As a breakdown of the top ten states with the highest and lowest taxes shows, the wireless consumers in Nebraska, Washington, and New York pay more than 20 percent of their wireless bills in taxes and fees, mostly due to the proliferation of archaic or duplicated surcharges. Experts from KSE Partners spent five years monitoring the federal, state, and local taxes imposed on wireless consumers. According to their analysis, wireless taxes grew three times faster than the retail sales rate between 2007 and 2010. The reason behind this is that legislators and Congressmen are targeting the wireless industry for tax money to relieve the burden from more recession-starved industries. In fact, a few states even tax wireless consumers for non wireless-related projects; for instance, Utah funds its poison-control centers with a poison-control surcharge found on wireless bills, and in 2009 Wisconsin imposed a police and fire protection fee to subsidize local departments."

5 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Not that unrelated... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So wait, emergency services that need to spend extra money for equipment and procedures to locate mobile callers (instead of much simpler land-line callers) are completely unrelated to cell phones?

    1. Re:Not that unrelated... by EdIII · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maybe we can ask all those patriotic Americans at the upper end of the economic spectrum who have done so well over the past couple of decades to help out. Society has done a lot for them, maybe it's time to ask them to do a little bit for society besides expect a 25% annual return on their capital.

      You forgot to add, "I want a pink pony too" at the end.

      Not only do those "powerful" people not pay their way, they are actively "fucking" us.

      I seem to remember the idea of the bailouts was that we, The People, help out the banks and Wall Street from going under and they would work with us to keep us in our homes.

      Did not work out. The banks actively fought and dragged their feet. Home loan modifications were not in their best interests. There are some very rich people right now that used government money to purchase properties with bad loans (fucking over the people in it) so they could literally double their money by selling it under market value (which was getting lower).

      The banks, Wall Street, and "powerful fuckers" laughed their asses off when we collectively asked them to keep their end of the bargain. Some really dirty dirty mother fuckers. They would not pay the property taxes and stiff the home owners associations, but rarely if ever, met the same penalties as the consumer for doing so.

      Where was government in all this? Doing the same thing they did with the tax code. Looking the other way and counting their special interest donations greedily.

      Such a big song and dance by GW Bush and Obama on how they were going to make things better and the only thing they did was give a TRILLION dollars to a bunch of clowns that not only did not change their behavior, but actively made it worse for us.

      Why is that a regular person can show up to court with proof that multiple banks bought the same mortgage security instrument and demand that one entity stand up and provide the note, the court shoots them down and proceeds with the foreclosure? Why is that the courts are powerless to allow an investigation into this kind of fraud, but must allow the foreclosure and tell the poor regular person that they must leave the house and then fight their battle in court again? The law. The law is the reason why. In most states the foreclosure is allowed to happen regardless of the circumstances. You can sue afterwards..... but that puts the consumer at a huge disadvantage and already causes them tremendous damages they will probably never recover from. At least from that mortgage company.

      The whole game is rigged for the "powerful fuckers". If they have not grown a heart and a conscience by now, I doubt we can hope they will anytime soon.

    2. Re:Not that unrelated... by demonlapin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Please, do tell me where I can get my 25% return.

      There is a real misconception on /. about money. You, and probably almost everyone else here, think that someone making $300k/year is rich. They're not; they're making a lot of money, but that's not the same thing as rich. Let's do the gedankenexperiment:
      Let us assume I make $300k. FICA, federal income tax, and state income tax reduce that to about $180k. For this experiment, we will make me the sole breadwinner in a family, and I will spend my income as though I were the median American household - which has an income just over $50k. Taxes take a much smaller chunk of that income, so let's call it $40k. I'm going to save $140k/year. Over a forty-year work life, I will be able to save $6.4M, barring growth in investments. Assuming that I invest in 5% interest bonds, I'll get to $18M - but with a constant, well-controlled 2% inflation rate over that time, that's only worth as much as $9M today.

      Nine million dollars is a lot of money, until you try to live off it as one of the idle rich. You rapidly find that you can only take about 1%-2% of the money per year to live on, if you want to stay ahead of inflation and the occasional market downturn. You can thus count on this: living off 1/8 of your pretax income for 40 years straight in a high-paying field will allow you to grant one of your grandchildren an idle life on the grand sum of about $120k/year. The truly rich are not living in the same world as the rest of us, even the upper middle class, and there aren't enough of them to make a difference. Any scheme designed to get money from "the rich" is going to fall disproportionately on the professional classes, because we're the ones who actually make the bulk of the money. And while we make quite a lot, most of us didn't come from privileged backgrounds, so I'd appreciate it if you'd tone down the class war rhetoric. Society didn't give me jack - my parents did, by living well below their means in order to send me to good (private) schools.

  2. Re:Free nationwide minutes? by Fjandr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Rent a mailbox in Oregon (or other favorable state), charter a corporation, get a phone + plan in the corporation's name. As long as you're routinely on the home network (not siphoning their profits to competitors via roaming agreements), they won't care. Bundle other location-dependent services like vehicle registration and insurance. Contract with a local registered agent as the corporation's location. With care, it'll cost a lot less in taxes. It's beneficial if you want change, no matter which change you want, since it creates more burden on the tax system by removing support from it. With enough people removing themselves from high-tax jurisdictions, the low-tax jurisdictions will be forced to change or the high-tax ones will break under the strain. Either is a win, depending on what team you root for.

  3. Utah Poison Control Centers by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The statement in the header is misleading. Yes Utah charges a surcharge to fund the Poison Control Centers (someone you call if you or your child have been potentially poisoned so they can tell you what to do before the ambulance arrives, such as drink milk or charcoal or vomit depending on the substance). But Utah charges this surcharge against all phone bills not just Wireless. This post phrases it as if Wireless is the only phone hit with the fee. Maybe some of you kids without Landlines don't think you are on the hook for the taxes that landline users pay but that's not the way it should be. Everyone should pay the fee that goes to support 911 and other emergency services like the poison control center. Wireless should be no exception to these very legitimate taxes.

    Now on the other hand, if the fee is simply to go around the regular tax system and is being used for general services it's a bad tax.