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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."
How about not forcing the postal service to keep 75 years' worth of back-funding for pensions?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Berkeley is a college town, so a large block of voters are students with no long term interest in the community. So a lot of kooks get elected.
Dear nitwit,
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
No tax ever stays in the advertised form.
Just in case someone reads this who has not experienced many examples already, consider the US federal income tax. The amendment describes a progressive tax of 1, 2, or 3 percent, and the reason it does not include the original line of "and not to exceed 10 percent" is because the politicians of the day thought that adding such a line would be seen as permission to raise the tax to 10 percent by their successors.
I have in Real Life(TM) ranted plentifully about road and bridge projects with a toll that were sold as "until the building cost is paid off" but persist many decades after all possible construction expenses had been paid simply because the regional government likes the revenue.
For only a few dollars extra per car, all the blacksmiths would still be in business.
The day after email is taxed is the day fmail is created.
__
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
How about we levy a $10,000 "tax" for politicians that introduce stupid legislation.
sudo make me a sandwich
No-one's explained -why would I want to fund the post office?
I just get spam and bills and rubbish. If it cost loads for these clowns to post me rubbish perhaps it would dissuade them and they'd have to actually provide value. The post office should be helping me by preventing it; instead they've stated they need all the spam to survive. Well, I'd rather they not survive.
And our tax dollars already go towards the up keep of the internet's infrastructure.
Ah, I love slashdot, where people simultaneously advocate anarchy, libertarianism, and socialism.
Yes, that's correct: we pay for the infrastructure with tax dollars (which would be socialism). Also, each person who pays for their connection also pays their ISP (which would be capitalism). This is true. So?
OK, here's the introduction to economics lecture. As a general rule, economic systems run more efficiently when people pay for the resources that they use, and run inefficiently when other people pay for resources that somebody else uses. Just a general rule to keep in mind.
Indeed, economic systems do not always run on this model (no, not even in ideal free markets). One example is the "all you can eat buffet." People don't pay proportionally to how much food they, primarily because the cost of the food itself is actually only a small portion of the total cost, and detailed accounting for the food eaten costs more than the trivial economic benefit gained. Yes, you can argue that e-mail is similar to that: the incremental cost of an e-mail (economists would say "marginal cost") is small compared to the cost of just keeping the network alive (however, email by nature goes through a series of computers between the sender and the recipient; so accounting would be less expensive than paying human waiter writing down orders on a pad.)
But the "all you can take" model relies on the implicit assumption that individual consumers do have a limit. If a semitrailer backs up to the all-you-can-take buffet, loads everything on the buffet into the trailer, and says to the cook "just keep it coming," the model will fail.
Like most of economics, then, there isn't always one price structure that works for all situations. There's always a trade-off of cost against benefit.
However, the knee-jerk reaction "put a cost on email! How dare anybody suggest such a thing!" seems a bit extreme. There are advantages in people paying for the resources that they use. There are also problems (which in economics, translates to "costs").
So, thanks for all the criticism, but I'll stick by what I wrote originally:
Good idea. Only problem: how could we implement it?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com