Tax Text Messages! Here’s Another Good Idea –

Here’s Another Good Idea

by Mustang

 

Carla Peterman

An exasperated Commissioner of the Public Utility Commission, Carla Peterman bemoans the California budget.  It continues to increase even as tax revenues fall.  Under most instances, we expect rational persons to conclude that if tax revenues are falling and budgets are increasing, then there are only two choices: decrease the budget or increase taxes to support it.  This may be the signature difference between conservatives and progressives: a conservative would scrub the budget of wasteful or patently stupid planned expenditures.  A progressive will take the less complicated road: increase taxes — and that just what  Carla Peterman, has proposed.  She wants to tax text messages because in doing so, it will help fund a program that makes phone services available to low-income Californians.

Let’s give it to Peterman – everyone should have a Peterman phone

 

 

 

And darn it, the state’s public purpose program budget has increased from $670-million in 2011 to around $998-million in 2017 while revenues collected the telecom industries have decreased from $16-billion to “only” $11.3-billion over the same period of time.  So, California needs to protect this “universal service” and intends to do so by placing a tax on text messaging.

Not all Californians are happy about this, of course.  People in the telecom industry aren’t pleased because the tax will impact profits (the reason they’re in business to start with).  Jim Wunderman, who serves as president of the Bay Area Business Council isn’t happy; he thinks the proposal is “a dumb idea.”  He argues that the proposal is a tax on how people converse in the twenty-first century.  Trade groups agree, and besides that, it taxes android messaging while ignoring such other applications as iMessaging, WhatsApp, and Facebook messaging.  They argue that Peterman’s proposal is illogical, anti-competitive, and harmful to consumers.

Peterman is pushing back, however, arguing, “If more revenues come from texting, then less revenues would be needed from voice services.”  Huh?

Anyway, how much money will this tax actually produce?  According to the California Chamber of Commerce, it should generate around $45-million each year.  But, dagnabbit, that’s not enough money!  Carla has a plan for that, too: she wants to make the new law retroactive for five-years.

It seems to me that we’re talking about an awful lot of money supporting “low income” citizens.  In California, low-income citizen means any person making less than an annual income of $30,000.00.  That’s right!  Because given the cost of living in California, it owns the dubious distinction of having the highest levels of poverty in the entire nation.  It also means anyone who is living in California illegally.  So, the proposed tax increase will benefit people who make less than $30-grand a year, including folks who, according to federal law, are living in the United States unlawfully.  To be clear, we’re speaking about 20.6% of the state’s population, or roughly 8.3 million.

Perhaps what California ought to do is take another look at the somewhat irrational notion that citizens (low-income or otherwise) have a constitutional entitlement to hand-held computers (cell phones).  I’m not certain about this, but I think this inane idea originated with Barack Obama, who took a humanitarian gesture (government subsidized landlines for senior citizens for emergency purposes) and expanded it to include cell phones that enable teenaged gangsters to organize flash-mobs, take pictures of police officers who exceed their authority, and to video-capture felonies … because dude, it’s cool.  One wonders how much an Obama Phone costs American taxpayers …

Before deciding to increase taxes, a responsible government would first reevaluate programs that drive up the cost of services.  Guaranteeing telephone services to 8.3 million citizens at the expense of the remaining 31.7 million people could be one of those things Peterman might scrub from the CPUC budget.  I’ll bet there are at least a hundred other programs that California might remove from their annual budget, but that will not happen for two reasons: first, the California legislature has a super-communist majority in the power, and second, no government has ever seen a tax it didn’t like.

But there is another point of view.  Maybe those 40-million Californians deserve outrageous taxes because it is they who overwhelming elected communists to the state legislature in the first place.