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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 28, 2024

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If you’re an American over the age of 50 you will remember more simpler days growing up. Children played outside with their friends and interacted over sports or out in the fresh air doing something. There was never an electronic appendage attached to our ears. Every household had a phone or two yet people talked with their families and neighbors and looked them in the eyes.
Today, people sit trance like staring at their cell phones, communications have become condensed in the form of abbreviated messages known as texts and very few homes anymore have regular land line phones, yet, just about everyone has an electronic appendage attached to their ears throughout the day as it’s become known as the proverbial “life line”.
Radical politicians and regulators in the state of California come forward now with a new plot to ensure the already besieged state with it’s weaponized fires, growing homeless population, sanctuary cities, illegal migrants, outrageous regulations while demonstrative demolition-crats push their Agenda 21 politics, and Californians keep getting the blood thirsty money and land grabbing poor leadership playing robin hood thugs, taken from the working class and given assets to illegals on the system.
One of the newest schemes coming down the pike is the proposal to tax your text messages, and get this, they even have the audacity to say they want to retro Californians back five years, are you kidding? Sounds like a big money grab….are you honestly going to tell me that Californians are going to allow the regulators to tax them back five years?
Texting your loved ones is about to become very pricey and the regulators say they are doing this all in the name of the poor!
According to the Mercury News “It’s unclear how much individual consumers would be asked to pay their wireless carrier for texting services under the proposal. But it likely would be billed as a flat surcharge per customer, one of those irksome fees at the bottom of your wireless bill – not a fee per text.
Business groups, including the Bay Area Council, California Chamber of Commerce and Silicon Valley Leadership Group and others opposing the idea, calculated the new charges for wireless consumers could total about $44.5 million a year. But they add that under the regulator’s proposal the charge be applied retroactively for five years, which they call “an alarming precedent” and could amount to a bill of more than $220 million for California consumers.
“A dense California Public Utilities Commission report laying out the case for the texting surcharge says the Public Purpose Program budget has climbed from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million last year. But the telecommunications industry revenues that fund the program have fallen from $16.5 billion in 2011 to $11.3 billion in 2017, it said.”
“This is unsustainable over time,” the report says, arguing that adding surcharges on text messaging will increase the revenue base that funds programs that help low-income Californians afford phone service.” “From a consumers point of view, surcharges may be a wash, because if more surcharge revenues come from texting services, less would be needed from voice services,” said CPUC spokeswoman Constance Gordon in a statement. “Generally, those consumers who create greater texting revenues may pay a bit more, whereas consumers using more voice services may pay less.”
Wunderman said he’s unaware of any other local, state or federal program that taxes texting, and the wireless industry has argued the state commission even lacks legal grounds for doing so. The CTIA, which represents the U.S. wireless communications industry including AT&T Mobility, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, said in legal filings to the commission that texting is an information service like email, not a telecommunications service subject to the commissions authority.
“The Federal Communications Commission is expected to affirm that Wednesday at a meeting, the CTIA said which would confirm that the state utilities commission “has no authority to impose surcharges on text messaging.”
Beyond that, the wireless industry argues a surcharge on texting would put carriers at a disadvantage with competing messaging services that wouldn’t be hit with the new fees, such as Facebooks Messenger and WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage and Microsoft’s Skype. Those kinds of services account for “almost triple the volume” of wireless carriers share of the more than 3 trillion text messages sent in 2018 alone, according to the CTIA.
“Subjecting wireless carriers text messaging traffic to surcharges that cannot be applied to the lions share of messaging traffic and messaging providers is illogical, anticompetitive, and harmful to consumers, “the CTIA said in it’s filings. In a letter to commissioners urging them to drop the plan, business groups and other critics added that wireless customers already pay a surcharge for the Public Purpose Programs, which they said “are healthy and well funded, with nearly $1 billion in the budget.”
But the commission in a proposed decision by an administrative law judge concluded “in principle that the commission should assess Public Purpose Program surcharges and user fees on all text messaging services revenue” and that it has the necessary authority to do so.”
Whatever the outcome of Californians being taxed to text, the rest of the country is watching and we won’t allow the political savagery to dictate to we the people, politicians work for us, remember it is the American people who vote them in, Californians need to rise up to them by voting differently because they will only get more of the same and it is sad to witness this beautiful state and it’s people having the rugs pulled out from under them…if you could only use your voices as loud as you use your text messages, you could transform your state and preserve it for generations to come.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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