Internet Tax

Once more to the barricades, brave friends!

A key congressional committee has proposed that a tax, originally created to pay for the Spanish American War, should be extended to all Internet and data connections. The committee proposed that the 3 percent telecommunications tax might be revised to cover all data, thus all information to end-users.

A taxation on information amounts to a taxation on speech. Where are the advocates of the constitution? Since when do Republicans advocate more taxes, or is this a “taxes two step”? How very regressive. A meaningless term but maybe it fits here.

Next, we might consider taxing speech, but then women talk more than men do. That would be even more regressive, huh. Maybe we should tax the air that we breathe. We could cut down on the carbon dioxide emissions, a CO2 tax. We could hold our breath on New Year’s Eve and defer the tax to the next year.

We already have an Internet tax on our phone bill. That’s got to go. The dumbest thing we could do now would be to add further impediment to an egalitarian free flow of information.

More tragic yet, the imposition of an information tax establishes a reporting requirement for the flow of data that can only be accounted for by an intermediary—“Ah ha, the phone company”--when in fact, for the Internet, no intermediary is needed at all!