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OMG! Now California wants to tax text-messaging?

NSX

Senior Member
Joined Dec 22, 2012
Messages 87
Toronto, don't get any funny ideas.


OMG! Now California wants to tax text-messaging?


Texting your sweetheart that you’re on your way home? California may soon charge you for that.
This is no LOL matter, critics say.
State regulators have been ginning up a scheme to charge a fee for text messaging on mobile phones to help support programs that make phone service accessible to the poor. The wireless industry and business groups have been working to defeat the proposal, now scheduled for a vote next month by the California Public Utilities Commission.

It’s a dumb idea,” said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council business-sponsored advocacy group. “This is how conversations take place in this day and age, and it’s almost like saying there should be a tax on the conversations we have.”
It’s unclear how much individual consumers would be asked to pay their wireless carrier for texting services under the proposal. But it likely would be billed as a flat surcharge per customer — one of those irksome fees at the bottom of your wireless bill — not a fee per text.
Business groups, including the Bay Area Council, California Chamber of Commerce and Silicon Valley Leadership Group and others opposing the idea, calculated the new charges for wireless consumers could total about $44.5 million a year.
But they add that under the regulators’ proposal the charge could be applied retroactively for five years — which they call “an alarming precedent” — and could amount to a bill of more than $220 million for California consumers.
 

ROBERTSON

Senior Member
Joined Mar 27, 2018
Messages 1,413
This is what happens when you get a government that cannot control its spending. Instead of being a small government that keeps its nose out of your business, California get's right up in there and "helps" everyone and regulates everything in order to make a better society. In order to do that, they have to spend a shit-ton of money. Since the government doesn't actually produce anything that money has to come from tax-payers one way or another. Meanwhile, millions have moved out of California to states with sane governments. So now you have fewer people paying taxes in Cali....which means you have to find new revenue streams or increase the taxes. So what do they do...tax yet another thing. Eventually there will be just a few people left in Cali paying taxes....and they'll probably have to pay for every breath they take.


Glad its one of your states came up with this first, and not one of our provinces,... :)

Do fully agree with your post, on flakey governments.
 
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