California Considering Tax on Text Messages

California is looking into unnecessary ways to take even MORE money from the pockets of taxpayers. 

This time, state regulators want to start charging a fee for text messaging on mobile phones to "help support programs that make phone service accessible to the poor."

The proposal, which is now scheduled for a vote next month by the California Public Utilities Commission, is not backed by the wireless industry who have been working to defeat it. 

“It’s a dumb idea,” Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council business-sponsored advocacy group told Mercury News. “This is how conversations take place in this day and age, and it’s almost like saying there should be a tax on the conversations we have.”

The fee would most likely be billed as a flat surcharge per customer and not a fee per text.

Business groups opposing the idea calculated the new charges for wireless consumers could total about $44.5 million a year if the tax passes.

Wunderman said, and many would agree, that there is really no other local, state or federal program that taxes texting.

The wireless industry including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others, have even argued the state commission lacks legal grounds for implementing such a fee. 

Read more at the Mercury News. 

Photo: Getty Images