Folks, check out your phone bill. Thanks to Al Gore and our esteemed Congress, taxes are higher for everyone who uses a telephone. There are no credits, no cap or floor, no way to escape this obnoxious Gore phone tax.
The Gore phone tax is simply added to everyone's phone bill, and if you don't pay, your phone service will be cut off.The new tax will generate billions of dollars every year in new federal tax receipts. The revenues are designated to flow directly under the control of the teachers unions, supposedly to carry out Gore's pet project of connecting every public school classroom and library to the Internet, even though the majority of schools are already Internet connected. None of these new tax revenues will go to teach schoolchildren the basics. Students aren't going to learn reading, writing and arithmetic by surfing the Internet.
Of course, part of this tax-and-spend boondoggle is to pay a salary of $200,000 to a Gore fund-raiser who will head up the new office. Congress did cut his salary to "only" $150,000 even though the General Accounting Office declared illegal the agency he will be heading.
Gore tried to get this tax levied secretly so you wouldn't be aware of paying it and the FCC pressured phone companies not to disclose it to their customers. The phone companies refused to take the hit of raising their rates without identifying the federal mandate that forced the increase.
It appears there will be an additional 85 cents for an FCC change and 93 cents for the "Universal Connectivity Charge." This is not a one-time charge, folks, and you know it will last forever.
My suggestion is to tell your congressperson to pay it since they slipped this "stealth tax" into the 1996 Telecom Act.
Marjorie Conta
Salt Lake City