Taxes On Cell Phones Hit All-Time High 171
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."
Re:What's wrong with taxes? (Score:2, Informative)
Taxes are how we transfer wealth away from the wealthy and give entitlements to those deemed deserving.
That's a terrible definition, IMO. Practically a Baraknophobic strawman.
Taxes provide, via defense, infrastructure, public safety, public education, etc., the basis for a stable society. That stable society is the basis on which almost all survive, many prosper and a few become very wealthy. Tax law holds people to their end of this bargain.
Re:Not that unrelated... (Score:5, Informative)
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.