In the old days of organized crime, strong-arm goons would go from small business to small business, demanding a payoff in return for not beating up the owner or trashing the business. This was illegal and reprehensible.
However, dress up the tactics of those goons in a city ordinance or federal law, and call the payoff a “franchise fee” or a “Federal Universal Service Charge,” and it’s legal.
Perhaps it’s legal, but it doesn’t make it any less reprehensible.
If you’ve not looked closely at your latest bill from Comcast, please do. Not only have they raised their prices, but the franchise fee (a tax by another name) has increased, as well.
I don’t know if the franchise fee (tax) increase was automatic, triggered by the increase in Comcast’s prices (which is a disgusting and cowardly way for our elected officials to increase taxes without taking responsibility for it) or if someone in government demanded a larger payoff from Comcast in order for them to conduct business here.
Now, check your phone bill. The “Federal Universal Service Charge,” which goes into a slush fund for pork-barrel spending, has gone up 25 percent. This was apparently enough to kick the sales tax up 2 cents per line.
We pay franchise fees to the cable company and to have our garbage collected. We pay sales taxes on cable and phone service, on water and electricity, on food and on some medicine.
Politicians see every aspect of our lives as an opportunity to create a revenue stream. Historically, politicians have used every new revenue stream as collateral for loans, digging us deeper and deeper into debt.
This is the true of our nation (nearly $15 trillion in debt), our state (which, for example, had borrowed money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits), the county (bonds for developers’ highways, for example), and city.
(To give credit where it’s due, the city of Peachtree City seems recently to have gotten a handle on some of its debt; kudos to them … but we must not relax our vigilance.)
Government is a voracious beast. The more it is fed, the larger it grows. The larger it grows, the more food it demands. Its food consists of taxes and fees. A simple way to control government is to put it on a diet.
I urge you to contact your city council members, your county commissioners, your state and federal representatives, and demand, in the name of government by the people, that they eliminate franchise fees, eliminate the Federal Universal Service Charge, and roll back taxes of all kinds.
We must — before this country destroys itself — take back our government.
Paul Lentz
Peachtree City, Ga.
