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Taxes On Cell Phones Hit All-Time High
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."
So you use a wider tax base to pay for them.
Absolutely. Since these resources are available to or able to be used by everyone, then use the widest tax base possible - raise taxes for everyone. If you can't pay for the poison control in your state, then your state needs to raise more taxes; state legislatures shouldn't be abusing growing industries just because they're terrified to say "higher taxes" instead of "wireless surcharge." It's either that or actually manage the state budget more responsibly.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Why should taxes only apply to the item/product/service being taxed? Why shouldn't a tax on gasoline go to research into the electric grid, for example? Why shouldn't a tax on luxury yachts go toward education?
I understand that there's a certain clarity when a tax on cigarettes goes toward providing research into lung cancer, but revenue is revenue. We've got municipalities and counties and states that are experiencing severe revenue shortfalls because of the economy. That money has to come from somewhere.
I'm not saying I like the wireless taxes being piled on because it's easier than closing tax loopholes for investment bankers, but the notion that all tax money has to go directly to an expenditure directly related to the tax itself seems simplistic.
Remember, the reason our tax code is tens of thousands of pages is not because it contains so many different taxes, but because it contains so many tax loopholes for special interest groups. Years ago I used to work for CCH, the company that publishes the tax code (like Westlaw, except just for tax law) and worked on tax preparation and compliance software (I wrote the manuals - I am not a programmer). Like most people, I thought all those huge books were full of ways for the government to collect money. Instead, I learned, they're full of ways that certain people can avoid having to pay taxes. It follows that the reason we can never get tax simplification laws passed is because rich and powerful fuckers don't want to have to pay their way.
As we learned in the 90's, the best way to get out of deficit spending and huge public debt is to have a good economy and lots of people working and making money. Cut the deficit from the supply side by increasing revenue. Then, when times are good, that's the time to look for ways to cut costs and make things more efficient (and more fair!). Cutting public spending when people are already suffering is just going to make it all worse. Look at how all the budget cutting is failing in Europe. When you've got a bunch of people who have been out of work and probably will never have another job because nobody is going to hire someone who's 60 years old and unemployed, the last thing you want to do is raise the retirement age so that now you not only have an unemployed old person, but you've got an unemployed old person who's going to have to eat cat food for an extra five years before they can collect Social Security. Since corporations that are showing record profits seem determined to continue to lay off workers, that's not really a good time for the social safety net to be cut back.
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 are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Or politicians are money grubbing thieves and hope people wont notice a 20% tax because it's stuffed int their phone bill. But your theory could be correct to.
Emergency services requires no new equipment and procedures. AFAIK, from my experience dealing with it with VOIP, when you call 911 two things happen:
1) Your carrier determines the nearest Public Safety Answering Point. They know which one to connect you to, because they know your location.
2) Your carrier passes your location information to the Public Safety Answering Point when connecting you to it.
In the past the ANI (Automatic Number Identification), not to be confused with Caller ID which can be modified, was used to transmit the information to the PSAP. The PSAP then did a reverse directory search to get a physical address.
My understanding is that recently (the last 15-20 years) with everything gone digital the PSAPs are already getting the address information without the need for a reverse directory search. Otherwise, cellular callers would not have any location information available, which most of the time there has been some.
It has ALWAYS been the responsibility of the carrier to connect you to the correct PSAP and transmit the correct location. This was difficult with wireless carriers since initially they could only guess based on the known physical location of the cell tower you were connected to. E911 laws (the FCC) in its current implementation phase require wireless carriers to transmit location information of a caller accurate to within 100 meters.
There is E911 service for most VOIP now. It is required by the FCC for most large operations anyways that are marketing to consumers or meet some sort of criteria like Vonage and the ISPs. My VOIP service offers it as well. That works by the customer registering an address (one only) with each phone number that they own. You make your E911 call by setting the Caller ID on the line. With my systems I inspect the corporate extension making the call, look up the branch office, set the appropriate Caller ID, and then the VOIP provider passes it to the appropriate PSAP they determine from that address.
So to my knowledge, there is NO DIFFERENCE between a cellular call, VOIP call, or land line call as far as a PSAP's equipment is concerned. It just presents the location information to the operator.
No new equipment required. No new procedures required. If the FCC already has this handled with current legislation, and all of the carriers are already passing the location information to the PSAPs, why are we paying all of these taxes on wireless for emergency services?
Not that I object to funding them. Just pointing out it does not need to be funded disproportionately from cell phones since they do not represent an added cost of providing the service.
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.
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.
Please, do tell me where I can get my 25% return.
/. 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:
There is a real misconception on
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.
Nonsense. Taxation is paying dues to have civilization.
There is no such thing as an American that made it on their own "hard work and innovation". If someone claims that they did, I suggest dropping them in Somalia and seeing how well they do where there is no "big government".
You are welcome on my lawn.