Under the radar, Obama and the FCC push ahead with scheme to tax broadband internet

The FCC wants to extend their Universal Service Fund tax on telephone lines to cover broadband internet services. As you probably know, the USF is responsible for giving out free "Obama Phones" to slackards. Now FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski believes those folks need free broadband internet too, and he's quietly pushing through a plan to pay for it.

That plan? Another Universal Service Fund tax on people like you and me who pay for our own internet lines.

Because hey, we can afford to subsidize porn downloads for welfare dudes, right?

The Universal Service Fund and it's cousin the FCC Subscriber Line Charge are two of the biggest boondoggles in phone service. They're a humongous pool of free money that the government can dish out to favored constituencies. Maybe subsidies made sense back in the 1930's when running copper telephone lines to East Nowhereville was expensive. But every square mile of America must already be wired up by now, because they've surely collected trillions of dollars in taxes over the past 100+ years to pay for it.

Yet every month the FCC sucks that money out of us. My latest phone bill shows $6.86 for USF and $13.92 for SLC. More than twenty bucks a month, for what exactly?

I wish I knew.

The bad news as the FCC sees it is this. More and more people are ditching their landlines in favor of email and cell phones. So the FCC's slush fund revenues are dropping.

There's nothing a bureaucrat hates more than declining tax revenues. They might have to cut back on some of their lavish expenditures.

And so to the FCC extending their Universal Service tax to broadband makes perfect sense. Gotta protect that revenue stream!

I call it more socialism. Wealth transfer. Tax my phone to pay for yours. Tax my health care to pay for some other guy's. Tax my groceries to pass out food stamps. Tax my mortgage to subsidize foreclosed deadbeats. And now tax my broadband to pay for yet another giveaway.

Why work? Why pay for anything? Vote for Obama and the best things in life will be free!

UPDATE 28 Aug 2012 09:29:
Linked in Wombat-socho's Live At Five. Thanks!

Posted at 10:18 by Chris Wysocki   [/tech]   Comments | Perm Link |
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