Did you ever look closely at your phone bill? As in most households, I maintain a landline, a business line and of course, several cellphone lines. I maintain the landline for the eventuality of any blackouts, power outages or random acts of terrorism which cause cellphones not to function. The only carrier in the region for landlines is Verizon, who is desperately trying to transfer you to their optic network because they do not want to maintain the deteriorating network of above ground phone lines.
As I was reviewing mine the other day, I found that the base service and calls totaled $20 not including long distance, but the taxes total $10 – that is half the cost of the service. The majority of the taxes go to the United States Federal government. The different taxes are masked with different names, excise tax, state tax, federal communication tax, etcetera.
The majority of all businesses are taxed. Is it any wonder so many businesses prefer cash? So while the amount of taxes being levied by the government is 50 percent of what is produced, why does the United States government have such a big deficit? These taxes are not only for landlines but also cellphones and every other mode of communication. Most everyone has a cellphone and consider their cellphone a critical part of their existence. So much so, that people forego eating to make sure they have this vital tool. By matter of extension, cellphones are so important people are lost without it. So with the monthly allocation of taxes to each user you would think the government would be out of debt. The U.S. deficit as of January 2015 is $18,152,064,350,208—the figure is too large to comprehend. To make this user friendly the debt per citizen is $56,796. Incredible!
