Maggie's Farm

Around these parts, we have hidden government fees tacked on to virtually everything. For landlines, the amount of the various fees imposed by the Public Utilities Commission now exceeds the basic cost of the service--fees to subsidize the poor who can't afford phones, fees to subsidize government infrastructure upgrades, fees to subsidize giving computers to every one in schools, etc.

Which is why most people are in the process of dropping their landlines and the telephone company is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Government increasingly loves calling things "fees" more than taxes because they often can be imposed administratively, without passage of specific legislation, and the revenue from fees is usually "off-budget," not having to be accounted for or showing up in publicly available budget reports.

I think people would be shocked if they actually knew how much they were paying in "fees" to various levels of government. They often are put in "special funds," held and administered by the agency, and essentially become operational slush funds.

A lot of them are buried in your utility bills, being administratively imposed by utility commissions as a condition of utility operation, and many of which have only the most tangential relationship to the service being provided.

This one is interesting, because, assuming a pass-through, consumers are being taxed to pay the promotion costs of a specific private industry, which the industry was not willing to do itself.