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The American revolution was largely caused by Britain’s taxing the American colonist, who had no representation in the House of Commons. An old vaudeville joke ran like this: "If you think taxation without representation is bad, you ought to try taxation with representation." Amen. In 1997 the Clinton Administration ordered Americans to pay a tax that was never discussed, voted on by Congress, or signed into law because it is not a law. It is a tax imposed by the FCC and consented to by the Administration and sadly, thus far, by Congress. This is, of course, the so-called E-rate, a tax your representative in Congress never adopted. They were not even consulted about it. It is wholly an Executive Branch idea and is patently unconstitutional.
As Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes has twice written, you pay an additional charge on all long-distance calls, by order of the FCC. That charge has different labels on various phone company bills, but the money ultimately goes to a federal program to pay for getting our schools and libraries connected to the Internet. The annual intake from this levy is $2.25 billion.
This is a dangerous recipe that sets a precedent for all kinds of other taxes or charges to be imposed without your congressional representative’s approval.
How did this happen? Some supporter (Vice President Gore in the case) had a little apparently innocent clause put into the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It purported to offer discounts to schools for connecting to the Internet. The FCC promptly interpreteod this language as authorizing it to establish an E-rate, which in plain language is a tax on long-distance telephone users. With no action by Congress, the FCC created three new bureaucracies to funnel your money to the schools after paying for the new federal employees and new contractors. The head of the principal authority, a former Gore fundraiser, was paid a higher salary than any member of the President’s Cabinet. (These three entities have since been reorganized into one, and Mr. Gore’s friend is gone.)
The Administration has boasted of doing all this for schoolchildren, but 95% of schools are already connected to the Net. Why hasn’t the Republican Congress killed this program, with its unconstitutional tax that amounts to 5% of your monthly phone bill? By 2003, if this tax is not stopped, it will total more than $10 billion.
There is still time to destroy this little monster before it gets so big that no one will dare touch it. We need some Boston "Indians" to throw this egregious usurpation of our rights into Boston Harbor, or even the Potomac!
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