Phone Tax -- Thank Al Gore for Those Bigger Bills Come July
Manchester Union Leader
June 16, 1998 Richard Lessner
Look closely at your telephone bill when it arrives next month. You will find a new 2.5 percent tax listed. Al Gore is the mug to thank for this new federal levy on your phone privileges.
Over Republican protests, the Federal Communications Commission last Friday imposed the E-rate, as it is officially called, or the Gore Tax as we prefer. This tax is another of Mr. Gore's blinding flashes of genius. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's latest brainstorm will cost the American taxpayers $7 billion by 2003, an amount roughly equal to what we will pay in federal gasoline taxes.
What will the feds do with the money? Wire school classrooms and libraries to the Internet, another of Mr. Gore's many New Age fevers. Mr. Gore and his co-conspirator, former FCC commissioner Reed Hundt, slipped the E-rate into the behemoth 1996 telecommunications bill, a monstrosity so immense and complicated that not even its most avid proponents pretended to understand it. Little wonder the Gore Tax went all but unnoticed.
Unfortunately for Mr. Gore's utopian visions, markets move faster than government bureaucrats. Although the FCC is just now getting around to imposing the Gore Tax, at least 80 percent of the nation's schools and libraries already are hard-wired into the information superhighway.
Mr. Gore, however, rarely allows such inconvenient things as facts to get in the way when he is busy doing good "for the children." Of course, Mr. Gore's fawning admirers in the teachers' unions are all ga-ga over the E-rate windfall, which they see as yet another source of taxpayer money to raid, if not for the Internet then for other vital educational needs. Condoms, perhaps.
Mr. Gore and his education establishment cronies simply ignore recent research findings that the educational benefits of the Internet are vastly overstated, at best, and just another faddish gimmick at worst. Nevertheless, the taxpayers must cough up another $7 billion on their phone bills.
Thus does the plundering of the American taxpayer continue. Voters should remember the Gore Tax and who gave it to them each month when they sit down to pay their telephone bills.
Manchester Union Leader
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