Redstate

Posted at 12:10pm on Jan. 29, 2008 California & Unions Plotting to Tax iTunes, Emails, and World of Warcraft.

This is a growing national trend.

By Erick

Most of you will not know what I'm talking about. You better get very familiar with it very fast.

Out in California, a new trend is starting that we can expect to sweep across the country pretty quickly. And it's a tax scheme disguised as a modernization scheme.

All of us with phones and cable television pay a telecommunications tax in the form a utility tax that local communities use to maintain telecom infrastructure. In California, several municipalities, in cooperation with unions, are working to modernize the tax.

They are claiming they will lower the tax rate on the utility tax, but the catch is that they are expanding what is taxed under the tax. The old tax just covered phone and cable. The "tax modernization" would cover cell phones, and any transmission "of voice, data, audio, video, or any other information."

This, in effect, becomes an iTunes tax and an email tax. And since municipalities can't impose their sales tax over the internet, they are gung-ho on this tax expansion.

And why are unions backing this? Because while the old tax was used to pay for specific things relating to telecommunications, the new tax will go into the general fund.

Get educated now. This is a growing trend and it'll probably be coming to your city soon.

Posted in 2008 | California | taxes | utilities — Comments (6)/ Email this page » / Read More »