Might be good to pass the word on this one...from WSJ
This new tax is unconstitutional! Not passed by Congress, but by the FCC.
Review & Outlook
The Gore Tax
Today Federal Communications Chairman William E. Kennard and his colleagues at the Commission plan to sit down and ram through a new 5%
tax on your home phone bill. Some of the blame lies with the commission,
which evidently feels it has the authority to write a tax hike whose scale
would make even the House Ways and Means Committee blanch. But the
main malefactor here is Al Gore, who should be lashed to a seat in front of
a Web screen for pushing through the law that set this tax in motion in the
first place.
The Gore Tax, as it should be known into eternity, is officially called the
E-rate for its educational essence, as in: "Every child in America deserves
a 21st century education and access to 21st century technology," to quote
the Vice-President. "The E-rate is critical to our effort to put computers in
every classroom and library." And of course Mr. Gore is personally going
to give it to every child in America.
To attach these computers to the electronic
superhighway, Mr. Gore and then-FCC Chair
Reed Hundt patched together the multibillion
dollar phone-bill levy, and then buried it deep
in the crevices of the 1996 telecom bill. The
President's budget assumes a tax revenue
potential of $13 billion, or twice the amount
we currently pay in federal gas taxes, by the year 2003. This is not going
to be a small tax.
But progress moves faster than politicians; in the last year some 80% of
schools and libraries have already been wired. No matter. The Gore tax
was already booting up. It wasn't until early this spring that people started
waking up to fact that the commission had pushed phone companies into
collecting $600 million from wireless and business customers. That was
just for starters. The full tax goes into effect this summer, when families can
expect a 5% surcharge on their phone bills.
After waffling, long distance's Big Three announced they would do the
right thing and break out the Gore Tax on their bill or in a separate
statement come July. A page of its own sounds about right to us.
This unmasking of his hidden tax provoked Chairman Kennard to issue a
press release calling AT&T's decision to itemize "premature, unwarranted
and inconsistent." He added that "the FCC will continue to drive long
distance rates down..." And you thought markets were what set prices in
this country.
In the sudden whirlwind of interest, the E-rate no longer seems like a sure
thing just as schools and libraries were starting to line up for their share of
the Gore bounty. On Capitol Hill this week, the bipartisan quartet running
the House and Senate Commerce Committees--Rep. Tom Bliley and Sen.
John McCain on the Republican side and Rep. John Dingell and Sen. Fritz
Hollings for the Democrats--dispatched a fire-breathing letter to Chairman
Kennard demanding that the commission suspend all further funding.
Speaker Gingrich further advanced the possibility of a major food fight
when he told the AP that "we'll probably block it in the next two weeks. . .
It is wrong for five unelected, appointed commissioners to be able to
establish a tax on every telephone line in the United States."
The manner in which this tax has been "enacted" is indeed bad. As
disturbing is the fact that the Vice President and company felt that this
presumably great public good had to be snuck through the process. If Mr.
Gore wants every phone owner in the U.S. to accept a 5% tax on their
monthly bills for some reason, let him run around the country in 2000
campaigning for it. |
