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."
hidden taxes are worse than regular taxes (Score:2, Insightful)
Coming from Canada I'm amazed at how low taxes in the United States are. I'd love to pay higher taxes and get a better society as a result. (Not that a better society is a given with higher taxes, but I do think higher taxes are necessary to support the functioning of a better society.) But this be the wrong way to do it. I'd love a simpler and more uniform tax code with lower corporate income tax with many fewer loopholes and higher personal income tax or sales tax (or GST or VAT or similar). The idea of special fees and taxes on specific goods and services seems counterproductive to me unless they attempt to make up for the social costs imposed by using those goods and services. Cell phones seem to be valuable and accessible to almost all people, and so cell phone specific fees seem like bad taxation to me, even though I would like higher taxes in general.
Re:Makes sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Makes sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes this:
"...manage the state budget more responsibly"
I have come to believe that's actually a strawman argument when people use it politically.
A politicians job is NOT to manage the budget, but to try to do what it's constituents want.
So what happens when the people don't ant higher taxes, want all the services, and scream at politicians to 'manage the budget"?
Well, you get in a situation where every pundit blames a politician for the problems when it's really the people that have a problem with a basic understanding of government finance.
The is a delusion going on that the US government has a lot of waste. IN truth, it doesn't. In fct a large majority of govenrment programs are extremely efficient and costs are well contained.
No, it's not perfect but it is damn good.
If someone want's to cut something, then fine we can talk about that specific issue. But blanket statements like "mange the budget" and "cut taxes" are worthless in and of themselves.
Sorry, I don't want to seem like I am ranting.
Re:Not that unrelated... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The young and the rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that unrelated... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that 911 operations need extra equipment: the tax is actually used for operating the 911 centers.
Okay.
The poster I was replying to was under the impression it was needed to provide equipment for location information and training for new procedures. I was responding very specifically to that misunderstanding.
If that same tax is put on land line telephones and VOIP then I don't have a problem with it. It's strange to disproportionately tax cellular customers for a service that is provided to everybody.
Obviously, as many people have pointed out this is not what they are funding so much that is offensive, but that they are finding a product and service we hold to be valuable and taxing the living crap out of it to create badly needed revenue for all programs.
Land lines are absolutely on the way out. I predict we will move to a VOIP only solution quite soon, and even VOIP will start to take over wireless soon. Since the revenue is shrinking rapidly from land lines, cell phones are an obvious target.
However, slamming taxes that are unrelated to communications on to it only puts an unfair burden on the middle class instead of spreading it around evenly. Not that taxes are ultimately even or fair.
Aww, hell I disagree with everything about how we do taxes right now! :)
I was just trying to give an informative post on how 911 service actually works.
Re:Not that unrelated... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Not that unrelated... (Score:4, Insightful)
You think that somebody that makes $300k isn't rich? Less than 4% of all households make that much money according to the census. Income Distribution in the U.S. [wealthandwant.com]
I'm not really sure how you can say that somebody that's in the top 5% of all households isn't rich. 90% of all house holds are making a third of that. You have a really strange definition of rich.