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City Councilman: Email Tax Could Discourage Spam, Fund Post Office Functions
New submitter Christopher Fritz writes "The Berkeley, CA city council recently met to discuss the closing of their downtown post office, in attempt to find a way to keep it from relocating. This included talk of 'a very tiny tax' to help keep the U.S. Post Office's vital functions going. The suggestion came from Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak: 'There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email.' He says a one-hundredth of a cent per e-mail tax could discourage spam while not impacting the typical Internet user, and a sales tax on Internet transactions could help fund 'vital functions that the post office serves.' We all know an e-mail tax is infeasible, and sales tax for online purchases and for digital purchases are likely unavoidable forever, but here's hoping talk of taxing data usage doesn't work its way to Washington."
The list above is moronic. It is wrong for the following reasons:
1) Mailing list etc.: Screw them. We don't need to let them come close to illegal activities without a cost to them. If you want to do a business that is very similar to a criminal enterprise, then you should bear reasonable costs to prove you are not a criminal enterprise. Even if what you are doing is legal.
2) Collecting money: If the email doesn't have a legal code showing it paid taxes, it gets automatically rejected and sent back to the sender
3) I am a user of email and I not only will put up with it, I WANT it.
4) Microsoft has no power or right to stop it.
5) Why do you think people can't spend 1 cent per hundred email? But anyway, it is not our legal responsibility to make life easy for the incompetent. See answer #1 above. Regulations are a part of business. If you can't comply, then you don't deserve to run the business., or get a job. But honestly, this w
6) We don't need a central authority for emails, we can do it with codes. Pay a tax, get a code number. Email software rejects those without the code.
7) Open relays in foreign countries are fine, it doesn't affect those that use the code rejection system
8) Screw the Asshats - and send them to jail for tax crimes
9)Armies of virus infected window boxes might actually get cleaned up if they were costing the idiots money by spamming
10) We are reducing the profitability of spammers.
11) Technically illiterate politicians are still smarter than YOU and came up with this solution
12) Saying something should should be free, it doesn't make it so. In fact, it isn't free - it costs the ISPs money every time you send an email, just such a small amount (electricity, electronic upkeep), that they don't charge for it. They should. The fact you don't know this represents your own foolishness.
13) This isn't a feel good measure, it actually solves the problem.
14) This idea is smarter than you - You are moron that can't actually come up with a valid counter-argument, so you resort to a list that other people made.
Reasons why this hasn't actually been tried yet:
1) A bunch of idiots like you that don't even want to try
2) Lobbying from the 'legal' mailing list people whose activities, while not actually criminal, are very close to it. They don't want to take responsibility for their