Democrats are really confused. A Berkeley Democrat wants to create a tax on email, to pay for the Post Office. That would be like taxing cars to pay for the horse and buggy industry. Democrats want to tax soda, the air (Cap and Trade), rain (EPA rain tax), pornography, grocery bags (forcing you to buy E Coli prone “reusable” bags, etc—you get the point. To paraphrase a Navy saying, “If it moves, tax it. If it doesn’t move tax it. If it is profitable, tax it. If it loses money tax it.
Next time you vote ask the candidates what new taxes they would impose. Then ask, which taxes they would repeal. Government should work for us. Currently most Californians are paying over 50% of earning for taxes.
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Wozniak’s email tax: Good sense or nonsense?
by Emilie Raguso, Berkeleyside, 3/7/13
Gordon Wozniak: So-called bit tax could help fund “vital functions” of the post office. Photo: Lance Knobel
Earlier this week, readers reacted with skepticism after Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak suggested that taxing email might be one way to raise money for the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service.
Wozniak told the council: “There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year… And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email,” perhaps one-hundredth of a cent. He said this would discourage spam and not have much impact on the typical Internet user. Wozniak went on to suggest a sales tax on internet transactions that could help, in part, fund “vital functions that the post office serves.”
One Berkeleyside Twitter follower called the idea “unworkable insanity.” Wrote another: “This is just insane. Does the esteemed councilman have the first clue how the Internet works?”
But there’s a history to this idea, however outlandish as it might sound to some.
The United Nations Development Program examined such a tax in its 1999 Human Development Report, Globalization With a Human Face, as a way to fund “the global communications revolution.” UNDP calculated that in 1996, such a tax would have raised $70 billion globally.
The New York Times took a brief look at the concept in 2009. Summing up an opinion piece by lawyer Edward Gottesman in the British magazine Prospect (behind a paywall), The Times said Gottesman thought such a tax could be used “to finance the expansion of bandwidth that the Web desperately needs.” He had suggested charging “a few cents per e-mail to cut down on the estimated 90 percent of it that is unwanted spam.”
“Opponents will argue that collecting the tax is impossible or unfair. Yet the status quo is unworkable,” wrote Gottesman. “Since early 2007 the global volume of spam has more than trebled. To stop this blizzard of unwanted messages, ISPs and most large businesses spend a sizeable chunk of their IT budget filtering out obvious junk. Despite this, most of us spend time each day clicking ‘delete’—and the deluge is getting worse. A unit tax on email would stop most spam. A peddler sending 1m messages a day hawking cross-border pharmaceuticals, for instance, would have to balance the uncertain revenues against the tax cost of £100,000 or $150,000 a week. Trying to con people out of money or their bank password would become a risky gamble.”
Advocates of such a tax say that ISPs could levy the tax as part of the monthly bill they charge users.
Harvard Law School’s Jonathan Zittrain, who specializes in cyberlaw and Internet governance, told Berkeleyside today that an email tax was a “terrible idea.”
“To the extent that the cheap flow of flat rate first class mail has positive effects for society at large, the insistence that the Post Office be revenue-neutral may not make sense,” Zittrain said. “Taxing email as an alternative, however, is a terrible idea: bad in theory and truly unworkable in practice. There have been proposals to see fees imposed on email by service providers — or recipients themselves — as a way of minimizing spam, but to impose an external tax on it when there are ready substitutes (Facebook messaging, anyone?), and when collection would be a nightmare, seems a non-starter. There is no reason to tax electronic mail users in particular to save the Post Office, any more than it would make sense to tax coffee drinkers to do it.”
On Wednesday, Wozniak said that, though he’s no expert on Internet taxes, he thinks the idea is worth serious consideration.
“Since many billions of emails are sent every day, an email tax could raise substantial sums,” he said, via email. “Most of the revenue raised could be used to fund the managing and maintaining the Internet Superhighway and a portion to subsidize snail mail. Think of it as analogous to the gas tax used to maintain our physical highways.”
He went on to say that, currently, an email tax is banned by Congress, so a major, top-level policy shift would have to occur before the idea could be put into practice.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Internet Tax Freedom Act ”to promote and preserve the commercial, educational, and informational potential of the Internet,” according to Wikipedia. The law forbids federal, state and local governments from taxing web access and “imposing discriminatory Internet-only taxes such as bit taxes, bandwidth taxes, and email taxes.”
The law has been extended several times since its inception, and currently includes a moratorium through November 2014. A commission authorized by the 1998 law was charged with studying national tax policy related to the Internet; its final report opposed Internet taxation, and took a variety of other policy positions.
Conflict alert: Berkeleyside sends out nearly 4,000 emails a day to subscribers to our daily newsletter (to say nothing of the many emails the Berkeleyside staff sends each day). At Wozniak’s rate, our daily email would be taxed about $125 a year.
E-mailing will never be the same if you do this! I'm not against change and believe me I want spam emails gone as much as you do, but I'm not sure this is the best way. it is by far the easiest for authorities, but what about internet users?
April 16, 2014 at 1:31 am
I don't think this will get many fans. you can't take away the best feature of e-mail!
April 15, 2014 at 1:47 am
I think people will be pretty upset over this. Think about how much money and effort this means for them
April 14, 2014 at 7:27 am
While it woul;d be extremely beneficial both to reduce spam and to have a maintainance fund for the online world, I think this is way too hard to implement because this is one of emailing's top advantage: it's free.
April 13, 2014 at 11:42 pm
I dont think this could be easily implemented and it will definitely make internet users revolt, especially after all the other threats regarding the internet
April 11, 2014 at 4:59 am
This could be a good idea, but think about why is e-mailing popular - it's availability - and now think about how this would affect its popularity.
April 11, 2014 at 4:12 am
This might actually be a good idea if the tax is meaningless (although, meaningless is kinda subjective, especially when we're talking about money) - but something like 1 or 5 cents for an email would indeed reduce spam…
April 4, 2014 at 12:00 am
Think about how frustrating it would be if you couldn't send your teacher the project he asked by sunday at 12:00 pm because you only have cash…
April 10, 2014 at 7:00 am
They want to tax all, but this can be agreat initiative because as catrina said, in this way can be stopped spam emails
April 3, 2014 at 1:04 am
If you think about how many people will actually stop sending chain mail spam or computer viruses, this doesn't seem so bad
April 2, 2014 at 5:54 am
I think that in this way will be sent just the important emails. Can be a great initiative
March 28, 2014 at 3:51 am
When I first read the article I thought it wad definitely nonsense, but now that I think about it, it would definitely eliminate or drastically reduce spam emails and stupid chain letters…
March 26, 2014 at 4:45 am