California wants to give “poor people” mobile phones. Maybe so they can call the poop patrols? Hey. I just shat on Lombard street. Get someone over here to clear this up. It stinks.
This category of the underprivileged undoubtedly includes some untold number of sanctuary state harbored illegal aliens. They are after all “poor.” And anyone else the state decides is in need. “Unemployed” MS-13 gang members with no legal reported income need phones too.
Related: California’s Poison Your Friends and Family Plan
To pay for the plan the regulators are considering a texting tax.
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.
The “fee” would probably not be a per text tax (yet) but a tax on the feature we call texting. The state would pile it onto the cost of owning a phone. Right next to all the other telecommunications taxes. The money would go to fund the dwindling resources in California’s Public Purpose Program budget, which,
“has climbed from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million last year. But the telecommunications industry revenues that fund the program fell from $16.5 billion in 2011 to $11.3 billion in 2017,”
“This is unsustainable over time,” the report says, arguing that adding surcharges on text messaging will increase the revenue base that funds programs that help low-income Californians afford phone service.
It’s Never About Spending?
Notice how the California Public Utilities Commission isn’t saying the spending is unsustainable? When the spending is the problem. The result of the Golden State becoming the fools gold state. A factory for homelessness. A perpetrator of the army of illegals in search of the promised free goodies.
Things for which someone else has to pay. And since this is California, we can get justifications like this.
“From a consumer’s point of view, surcharges may be a wash, because if more surcharge revenues come from texting services, less would be needed from voice services,” CPUC spokeswoman Constance Gordon said in a statement.
A tax by any other name is still a tax. But it is not a tit-for-tat. There is no trade-off. They need to take more of your money. You will have less in your pocket. How they do it and what they (the politicians and regulators) call it is a wash.
H/T Washington Times – SFChronicle.com
