Please consider California Proposes a Plan to Tax Text Messages.
A new surcharge proposed by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) wouldn’t be a per-text tax, but a monthly fee based on a cellular bill that includes any fees for text-message services.
The 52-page proposal by CPUC Commissioner Carla J. Peterman lays out the details of the plan, and says the state’s Public Purpose Program budget is going up while incoming fees to fill it are decreasing
According to the CPUC, the charges go to a number of different programs, including 911 services, subsidized phone service for low-income residents, and equipment for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.
The proposed plan could be complicated by a new Federal Communication Commission ruling. On Wednesday, the FCC approved a new rule that classifies text messages as an “information service” like email. Proponent of the rule say it will give carriers the ability to crack down on spam messages, and critics say it could lead to carriers censoring messages.
The CTIA argued in a legal filing submitted Wednesday that if texts are an information service, then the CPUC doesn’t have authority over them and can’t add on surcharges. It claims the proposal would go against federal law.
Retroactive Five Years
Mercury News notes that “under the regulators’ proposal the charge could be applied retroactively for five years.”
Lovey.
I have a better idea. Stop giving away “free” phone services. Then you won’t have to collect taxes to pay for them.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
The majority in Sacramento is bonkers, which is a pity because CA used to be a wonderful state. Now they would like to pass a bill that is impossible, and even if it was possible, people would find another way and avoid the tax.
“Wow what a deep thought Mish, get rid of services for those nasty poor folks.
Martin Armstrong, today: “In Illinois, the city of Peoria has been forced to eliminate 22 firefighter and 16 police positions even after they made 27 layoffs earlier this year. Your taxes are going to pay for the retired people and services have to be cut because they cannot afford current employees.”
Seriously F them. Public union workers are overpaid. The city of Peoria ought to go bankrupt and slash benefit. But it cannot because the state won’t let it. But it could just stop paying all benefits.
You are totally nuts if you think these benefits can and should be paid.
All roads now lead to ruin.
Should people who paid into pensions be stiffed entirely?
Are the 1000’s of public pension scammers bringing in $80k-plus (if not $120k-plus) annually the real problem?
Foolish or not, lots of people worked in schools, municipalities, etc. and operated on the belief that they’d have a pension to keep them from starving at 68. Most are not eligible for Social Sec. Were they promised far too much? Yes. Who is worse, the con artists who made the promises or the marks who lined up to be conned?
Should someone be able to retire in mid-50’s and receive just as much as they did while working? Only if they also saved outside the pension (and few did, I’d bet.)
Pensions (defined benefit) never made sense, but no system that claims to eliminate market risk is honest. The 401(k) revolution simply transferred market (economic) risk from employers (and taxpayers) to individuals, few of whom understand much about markets and risk (and neither do their “money managers.”)
We had a credit-creation mania. Part of it was promising future cash flows to people based on fantasies and delusions, not on nurturing the capital production to actually deliver what was/is promised. The visible part was creditor-fever, an insatiable appetite for others’ IOU’s (Bonds.) An ocean of bonds was thus created.
Everybody’s going to get stiffed sooner or later. Pensioners, yes, but so will bondholders and creditors across the board.
Ultimately, the question is only whether people will wake up and act soon enough to pick the best of the only two realistic alternatives left: Mogadishu in the 90s. Rather than wait for Caracas anno now. Any other supposedly possible outcomes, are rapidly becoming no more than Utopian chimeras.
The bond holder should get the shaft for sure. They need to expect higher yields if they are lending money to cities that are fiscally irresponsible. Also public employees on average are paid 1.5 time the corresponding private sector employee makes. They often game their hours the last few years of employment to disproportionately raise their retirement benefit. A common tactic allowed and encouraged by the management. The retirees also need to feel the pain by a benefit cut especially by the most flagrant pensioners. One thing that would help reduce retirement burdens on public entities is to eliminate health care coverage and this could be accomplished by universal healthcare. (Please no hate posts about that) its coming at some point whether we like it or not.
Certainly enough California legislators know what the phrase, “No law shall be passed ex-post facto” means before the proposed bill is put to a vote.
That won’t stop those loons.
“Certainly?”
Do you really think most of those elected are that bright? In January the US Senate will seat a woman who publicly admitted she couldn’t name the three branches of government.
Idiocracy is here. We’re governed by open morons.
Too many people talk in terms of “they” as if “they” are some foreign entities from somewhere far away.
“They” are our next door neighbors, the people we see in the supermarket or on the local streets. And most of “they” are just as dumb as the average person that we make fun of.
We’ll always be governed by morons. The only question is how much power over us, we allow the morons to have.
The solution should be reduce the Public Purpose Program budget and spend what it is funded for. Why are they spending more than the program allows? Send out end of support notices to the phone users. A cheap phone plan is $10 a month + $9 in taxes.
“Wow what a deep thought Mish, get rid of services for those nasty poor folks.”
Martin Armstrong, today: “In Illinois, the city of Peoria has been forced to eliminate 22 firefighter and 16 police positions even after they made 27 layoffs earlier this year. Your taxes are going to pay for the retired people and services have to be cut because they cannot afford current employees.”
Government employee retirement costs are going to crowd out government services to the people.
Served a night in a homeless winter shelter in California. Out of about 16, people in the shelter, about 12 of them had phones. And they want more money?
Nice thing to do.
They also want postal services. And government provided roads. Both of which are much more expensive, and generally much less valuable, like all things with great government involvement.
Every time I look at my cellular bill or cable bill, it’s full of taxes. My texts are already being taxed. Why not just raise the tax rate of taxes already in place instead of adding a new tax?
How are they going to determine if someone texted? I’m sure people will just switch to a different app that effectively does the same thing as a text but technically isn’t.
Whoever came up with this idea is a technological neophyte.
State regulatory agencies eventually reflect the world view of those appointing them; California’s is now dysfunctional. We mandate that power utilities string power to cities allowed to be built in firestorm wind tunnels, then our PUC votes unanimously in January to close our last nuke, producing nine percent of the state’s power grid output. Every time the bills for these follies become dangerously close to demanding payment, a new tax is slipped under our doors…like this one, and last year’s massive new gasoline tax levy. Five year’s retroactive tax hiking is at least innovative idiocy.
A 5 year retroactive tax? If the courts don’t stop that then they really are just a rubber stamp for government. Next stop, California passes a retroactive tax on everything everyone owns back to Sept 9th, 1850.
Maybe they will first pass a law that drivers must keep yellow emergency vests in their cars? That would be hilarious.
Wow what a deep thought Mish, get rid of services for those nasty poor folks. It’s almost like libertarianism is an actual, feasible economic model. Almost. But not really. It’s a fine personal philosophy if you’re OK with coming off like an autistic person who only cares about themselves, but applied to society at large? LOL. Start a political party and call it “Mad Max.”
Believe it or not, people can survive without a smart phone. Billions do every day. It’s like we evolved for millions of years to be able to function without them.
A smartphone no longer costs much more than a tomato to produce, so while you can certainly live without one, I’m not sure why you would want to.
RC, Goodyear just closed its factory in Venezuela. It just isn’t viable anymore.
The French are protesting high taxes.
Higher taxes in California will drive the standard of living down for the average person. Socialism eventually leaves the average person impoverished, as the French are learning.
As Zardoz pointed out, smart phones are not essential. In fact, while I could have afforded one years ago, I preferred to not have one until recently, and while I have one now, I use it little enough that the battery can last up to ten days.
In a fully libertarian economy, the market would be much more efficient than what we have now, but also harsher. Welfare programs and taxes both serve to make the economy less efficient, and thus lower the average standard of living, but make it less harsh. In a fully socialistic economy, everyone woult have an identical, but low, standard of living. Reasonable people can differ as to where to draw the line.
Public union pensions will be paid.
That is all you really need to know.
Were pensions paid in Russia after the failure of the USSR?
That’s the level of change in the offing.
Rahm to tax pot, gambling, whores and organ sales to attempt to support the ponzi.
“I have a better idea. Stop giving away “free” phone services. Then you won’t have to collect taxes to pay for them.”
As long as government can buy the vote of A with free services paid for at gunpoint by B, that’s what government will do.
It won’t stop until B realizes it is government’s ability to steal and redistribute that is the problem which needs solving. No different from any other amoral self optimizer, if government can steal, it will steal.
The problem is, everyone is both thief and victim. This is why we’ll ride this train right off the missing trestle.
You’re right that everyone is both thief and victim. But that’s just like saying everyone playing at a Casino wins sometimes, loses others.
The “winning” is largely just an obfuscation of the fact that the system has a definite, built in, edge; steadily redistributing from players to the house. Financialized economies are no different: Wealth is steadily redistributed from those who produce it, to those who have power to redistribute, it and those closest to them.
In practice, from those who work producing value, to banksters, lawyers, administrators, public sector makeworkers etc. As long as the former, the value producers, allow the fact that they occasionally are allowed to “win” some crumbs, in the form of house “appreciation” for example, to keep them from seeing the general trend of taking from them to fund the leech army preying on them, things won’t change. They’ll keep getting raked over the coals to an ever greater degree, while seeing less and less in the way of “winnings.”
I concur. Ours is a parasitic economic system in spades. I guess this is what happens when living standards rise far and fast, so that people don’t seem to notice that they’re being robbed blind, deaf and dumb.
Were this an honest system most productive Americans would probably need to work no more than 20 hrs a week to sustain their same lifestyle. Instead, we have a growing army of parasites, encouraged and enabled by master-parasites, all sucking the productive dry while reliably insulting those productive for the Leftist-sin-of-the-Day (nowadays usually racism or butt-buddy-a-phobia.)
+1
Which is why the classical economists’ emphasis on including leisure as an economic good in their analysis, was one of the first casualties of replacing economics with the pseudo-babble that has currently taken its place in official discourse.
Being replace by nonsense like “unemployment” statistics, as if spending ever more time and effort toiling away just to make ends meet, is some sort of “good.”