03-12-2010, 07:49 AM
808 - can we please have a discussion without snarky personal attacks? ("you are just participating in the doubletalk").
The distinction I was trying to make (unsuccessfully, apparently) is that the gov't doesn't mandate this fee on phone bills and that it is not a "tax" paid by all tax payers. The USF is a government mandated "contribution" (yes, that's the word the gov't uses, but I would also call it a "tax")on telcos to fund some worthy objectives (bring phone service where it isn't, subsidize those who can't afford it, etc.). Telco's then pass this cost of business on to their customers via a line item on the bill or by cooking it into enterprise customer contracts because the government "allows" them to, not because it mandates them to. This allows gov't to say with a straight face that they didn't raise taxes on consumers for this valuable social good, and they can cynically add "we're not forcing your telco to pass it on to you, so if you don't like the tax, complain to your telco or switch to one that doesn't charge the USF" (good luck finding one...)
Telco's take heat from their customers when monthly bills increase due to the increases in the mandated USF "contribution" over which they have no control, so (as I stated) they wish the gov't would collect the revenues from this program directly from citizens, rather than making the telcos the tax collectors/bad guys.
Meanwhile the size of the overall fund has increased from $2 billion in 1999 to more than $8 billion today - and the percent of homes with phone service (according to census figures) has only increased from 92.9% in 1980 to 94.6% in 2007.
So Rob, yes, USF is a good idea. But for now, I see an awful lot of money going in, a lot of small rural telco's paying huge dividends to their shareholders, a bunch of cellular companies getting subsidized to provide service that competes with other USF-subsidized services, and yet we still don't have widespread availability of broadband just a few miles outside Hawaii's second largest city.
The distinction I was trying to make (unsuccessfully, apparently) is that the gov't doesn't mandate this fee on phone bills and that it is not a "tax" paid by all tax payers. The USF is a government mandated "contribution" (yes, that's the word the gov't uses, but I would also call it a "tax")on telcos to fund some worthy objectives (bring phone service where it isn't, subsidize those who can't afford it, etc.). Telco's then pass this cost of business on to their customers via a line item on the bill or by cooking it into enterprise customer contracts because the government "allows" them to, not because it mandates them to. This allows gov't to say with a straight face that they didn't raise taxes on consumers for this valuable social good, and they can cynically add "we're not forcing your telco to pass it on to you, so if you don't like the tax, complain to your telco or switch to one that doesn't charge the USF" (good luck finding one...)
Telco's take heat from their customers when monthly bills increase due to the increases in the mandated USF "contribution" over which they have no control, so (as I stated) they wish the gov't would collect the revenues from this program directly from citizens, rather than making the telcos the tax collectors/bad guys.
Meanwhile the size of the overall fund has increased from $2 billion in 1999 to more than $8 billion today - and the percent of homes with phone service (according to census figures) has only increased from 92.9% in 1980 to 94.6% in 2007.
So Rob, yes, USF is a good idea. But for now, I see an awful lot of money going in, a lot of small rural telco's paying huge dividends to their shareholders, a bunch of cellular companies getting subsidized to provide service that competes with other USF-subsidized services, and yet we still don't have widespread availability of broadband just a few miles outside Hawaii's second largest city.