“The Obama administration’s proposed 2010 budget seeks to significantly boost the user fees the U.S. government charges holders of public airwaves held by many telephone and wireless companies,” Reuters reports.
“Yearly fees for spectrum licenses are proposed to rise to $200 million in 2010, from $50 million in 2009, according to the document posted on the Office of Management and Budget’s Web site,” Reuters reports. “After that, the fees eventually increase to $550 million per user per year, totalling $4.8 billion over the next decade.”
“In the government’s most recent spectrum auction, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Vodafone Group and Verizon Communications spent about $16 billion to get access to the airwaves,” Reuters reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Any fees levied on any business will, as usual, be passed along to the end user. Perhaps the affected companies will also cut some more jobs and/or erect fewer towers in order to make up the difference if they worry that they’ll lose too many customers due to rate hikes. In other words, this is yet another tax increase; one that targets mobile phone and device users, including Apple iPhone users in the U.S.
By the way, U.S. Tax Freedom Day, the day of the year that you begin working for yourself and not the U.S. government, arrived on April 23rd last year. Yes, in 2008, Americans worked the first 74 days of the year to pay their federal taxes and then an average of another 39 more days to pay state and local taxes.
Did you get your money’s worth?
Since 1937, The Tax Foundation has produced and published reliable information on government finances at the federal, state and local levels. Find out more about Tax Freedom Day here. The U.S.A has been a debtor nation since 1791.
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. – Ronald Reagan
