Taxes And Fees On Wireless Phone Plans Surge To 18%

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 11/16/2015 | John Merline

[IBD editorial writer]

The cost of mobile phone service has been steadily declining over the past decade, as cellphone companies fiercely compete for business. But customers aren't seeing it in their phone bills, thanks to revenue-hungry federal, state and local governments.

[Yo-Yo]

Gotta pay for those Obamaphones.

[ilgipper]

If I ran for office,’fees’ would be a central tenet of my message. I’d show all the fees on cable, phone and Internet bills and focus on gas taxes, energy taxes and all the regressive government grabs hurting people every month.

[MarchonDC09122009]

RE: “Gotta pay for those Obamaphones”

You ain’t kiddin.
Regularly see Free wireless phone carrier tent kiosks abound all ‘round LA’s BLM areas, push’in disadvantaged to git their “Free” phone.

#TaxpayersLivesMatter

[Slambat]

$25.15% ???????

You also pay income tax on the tax you pay. Well some do,
I don’t. I can wright it off but average Joe clock puncher
gets the shaft.

[glennaro]

Government is desperate for money — truly desperate.

[from occupied ga]

thanks to revenue-hungry federal, state and local governments.

thanks to revenue-hungry greedy rapacious federal, state and local governments.

Fixed it to more accurately represent the actual description of government

[tet68]

My basic bill rose this month by $16.

[DJ MacWoW]

Free Republic

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[justlittleoleme]

I switched to airvoice wireless 2 years ago.

Prepaid wireless plan, runs on AT&T towers.
Compatible with any AT&T or unlocked phone that takes sim cards.
My plan
$30 a month - no extra taxes or fees
Unlimited Minutes
Unlimited Text
Unlimited MMS
1 GB Web - I don’t use my cell phone for much web anyway.
(500MB High Speed / 500MB reduced Speed)
https://www.airvoicewireless.com/PlansA.aspx

[upchuck]

A captive, addicted and highly exploitative audience. Perfect for government fees and taxes.

Should laws be passed dictating a ceiling?

Exercise: draw parallels between the fedgov fees on cigarettes and cell phones.

Are cell phones the new cigarette?

[Resolute Conservative]

Woo technology... Utter BS I used to stick a stamp on an envelope but everyone wants paperless billing and online payments so they can charge me surcharges. I thought technology would eliminate the costs of having to employee personnel to handle the mail thus translating to savings. BS, it costs more to do the online stuff. Just another lie.

[Reeses]

git their "Free" phone

Think of them as government required personal tracking devices. They have photo, video, voice, text, and GPS recording abilities that dictators could only dream of. The government can find out everywhere someone has gone and everyone they know going back years. Many a crime is solved this way now.

Not only do most people always carry a government bug, they pay an 18% tax for the privilege!

[CurlyDave]

...I thought technology would eliminate the costs of having to employee personnel to handle the mail thus translating to savings. BS, it costs more to do the online stuff. Just another lie.

The transaction costs are lower for online payments. The problem is that people have started to like paying on line, so they can charge you more for it. It has nothing to do with their costs, they charge you because they can.

For a great example of this type of behavior, look at the history of charges for text messages. Text messages cost very little for a wireless phone provider to carry and take very little system resources. The amount of data in one second of voice phone call would fill many pages of text. But, the original cell phones and their plans did not have text messages. So, when something new came along the carriers took the opportunity to rape and pillage. Fortunately, carriers had to compete and lately text messages are getting to be less costly, but they are still charged all out of proportion to their fair share of system resources consumed.

I know for sure that any new mortgage, credit card, or consumer credit I get, the costs of paying on line will be discussed up front, and will be considered as part of the total deal.

[TomGuy]

I have an Internet ‘landline’ phone [Ooma]. I paid for the box, so my only monthly costs are the e911 fees and state/FED taxes.

My fee recently increased from $3.85 to $4.18 (about 9%). That is not a big increase, but it IS an increase.

I use prepaid mobile because I don’t make many calls. My mobile costs run about 1/4 (around $7/month) of what I used to pay for a regular telephone landline. The taxes and fees are incorporated into the service/minutes costs, so I don’t really know how much they are. I do have to maintain the monthly ‘service’ but minutes I purchase roll over. And with my current smartphone, purchases add 3x the minutes for talk/text/data.

[minnesota_bound]

I pay $30 flat rate every month for my T-Mobile account. I received a text this week from them telling me the state of California will charge a state mandate surcharge starting January 1st.

They only gave an example of how much it would be. Example was for $20 it would be $2.00 charge. There are 4 tax / surcharges that could apply.

Robbers as none of the money will actually go to 911 or the variuos public programs and utilities they state. Not a dime as we already pay for this with our current taxes!