From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…
‘Election Deception,’ California-style
The profligate spending of California’s local governments means pols are going to extreme lengths to grab revenue. Voters in more than two dozen California jurisdictions, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, will be asked next week to approve telephone tax increases. Thanks to misleading summaries on local ballots, many will actually think they’re voting for tax cuts.
The California Taxpayers’ Association calls it "Deception 2008." Only two jurisdictions, Eureka and Seaside, appear to have legitimate phone tax repeals on the ballot.
It all started in 2006, when the U.S. Treasury ruled that an antiquated "utility user tax," created to fund the Spanish-American War, no longer applies to many of today’s phone services. Local pols realized they would need to get voter approval to continue collecting the hefty taxes. But how to dupe voters into going along? Answer: With ballot proposals that offer modest "cuts" in the phone tax and don’t clearly mention that, absent a vote, the tax would disappear altogether.
In some jurisdictions, politicians have gone so far as to craft tricky language to expand the taxes to text messaging and other digital services. Sacramento’s "Utility Tax Reduction and Fairness Measure," for instance, fails to mention the new services subject to tax, but promises to "preserve funding for essential municipal services like police, fire protection and youth programs."
Bottom line: California voters should exercise extreme caution before voting for something that sounds like a reduction in the tax on talking.