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Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 57 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
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Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:48:00 -0800
From: Richard <rng@richbonnie.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
Message-ID: <3nhbq4d9ku7eaap68d30e72okhrbjphvp3@4ax.com>
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:19:13 -0500 (EST), muzician21
<muzician21@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I'm with Embarq since they're the only game in town for DSL in my
>area.
>
>Taxes and surcharges of 16.51 on total charges of 44.80 - the DSL
>internet which is an additional 19.95 isn't taxed according to the
>bill.
>
>The taxes have names like Telecommunications relay surcharge,
>Interstate access surcharge, etc. etc.
>
>So that works out to almost 37% of the taxed portion of the bill.
>That's over 5x the tax rate on consumer items in many counties. Is
>this typical?
I use AT&T for my wire-line telephone service in Nevada. My
surcharges and other fees are:
| Federal Subscriber Line Charge | 5.14 |
| Federal Universal Service Fee | 1.59 |
| Carrier Cost recovery Fee (Long Dist) | 1.99 |
| Total | 8.72 |
My bill for local and unlimited long distance is 51.00 (which includes
many custom calling features) before the above fees. So the tax+fee
rate is 8.72/51.00 = 17%.
There is no tax listed, so apparently communiations services are not
taxed in Nevada. (That's good, because our sales tax rate is about
7%).
I get Internet (but not cable TV) from the local cable TV company. The
bill lists CALEA fee of 0.42, but no other fees or taxes. I believe
that CALEA stands for "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement
Act", so the fee is to reimburse the cable company for complying with
this law. Hmm, this means that I'm paying a fee for the government to
spy on me.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:20:48 -0800 (PST)
From: Joaquin Mendez <jmendezortiz@gmail.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
Message-ID: <67640ffb-e1e0-4fcc-871d-89f3b07e16bf@l39g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 25, 1:54 am, hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> On Feb 24, 4:19 pm, muzician21 <muzicia...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > So that works out to almost 37% of the taxed portion of the bill.
> > That's over 5x the tax rate on consumer items in many counties. Is
> > this typical?
>
> Yes, it is typical.
>
> Some of the taxes are for social purposes, such as deaf people
> communication, low-income people communications, and public safety.
> Other fees are actually merely part of the rates you pay for service,
> falsely disguised as a special fee rather than a part of the service
> cost.
>
> IMHO, this is all an unfortunate, but predicted result of Bell System
> divesture 25 years ago. Basically, the biggest users of
> communications got a price break at the expense of small users.
Unfortunately, yes.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:37:14 -0600
From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal?
Message-ID: <6645152a0902251537g5828da69i8ad66c22cef68863@mail.gmail.com>
Not to hijack the discussion, but I'm going to switch to taxes and
fees on cell phones (I realize we're discussing landlines). We have
been with all of the Big Four cell providers in the past 10 years and
our monthly bills have always shocked us because they're nowhere close
to the fees promised when we purchased the plan.
Texas charges roughly a 21% tax on cell phones. Add to this per phone
charges for various local, state, and federal mandates, local taxes,
and federal taxes and you're suddenly looking at a huge bill.
I don't have a bill in front of me (I held off responding to this
because I wanted one in front of me, but won't have a new bill for a
couple of weeks). If I'm not mistaken there's a $5.95 per line
charge. So when we add another phone for $10, right off the bat it's
$15.95. Plus other other smaller fees I missed, 80 cents here, a
dollar there. And the added fee for unlimited texting for the kids.
And the previously mentioned taxes. Wow.
I don't know this is true. But I'm guessing once upon a time cell
phones were looked upon as being luxury and business items, so states
taxed them heavily. As time went on everyone got a cell phone, but
states enjoyed the revenue stream and never dropped the taxes.
John
--
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
Austin, Texas, USA
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