Obama Proposes New Wireless Spectrum Fee


Alright one more negative proposal like this coming from Obama and I will lose all support of Obama.

who cares. having a cell should technically still be a luxury. there are 5 year olds running around with cell phones nowadays wtf. if you want it, pay for it.

^I agreeee!! I don't even use my cell phone. I think only adults and extremely busy teens should havethem.

luxury or not, the government should but out

Yeah, there's like 3 foot tall kids in my school carrying them around.
I have one, but its for emergency's, i never really understood the whole "texting 24/7" thing.

I don't see any point in taxing cell phones... except for like.. greed?! How much money does it take to make signals fly through the air?! Definitely not 500million dollars....

I agree that it's retarted, but just because the phone companies are getting charged doesn't mean phone bills will go up. I assume they will, but it hasn't happened yet. You never know..



same here. I don't even text 1/7. I prolly send 5 messages tops a week.

More than likely the bills will go up. Cell phone companies need to keep their profits up... no way in hell are they gonna allow to lose profits. This is gonna go down the totem pole and right into the hands of Cell Phone subscribers.




Some people prefer to just have a cell phone instead of having a cell phone and a land line (house phone). Some people need their cell phones for their business as well. Cell phone bills by no means are cheap today unless you use your cell phone for emergencies, not for daily usage.

Lol, I can't say I'm surprised. I mean we are already paying tax for the damn air that we breathe. "Global Warming" anyone?

Well, when companies require you to have a cell phone (both of my parents' companies do), they pay the bill for you... it wouldn't really affect my family at all if bills went up... except maybe my sister would have hers taken away because she texts every waking moment.

Well if your parents make 250k a year, prepare for the wrath of Obama's taxes, because they're gonna get hit nasty style, regardless.

Just sayin'

Yeah, that's the point. Maybe an extra $5 on your bill won't affect you much. But think about it. There's millions of people who have cell phones, and if you add $5 to millions of peoples bill, look at how much income they are taking from us.

But that money would go to good use with Obama in office? We won't be wasting it on war, and we won't be wasting it on medicare (as much as we did with every other president in history :O).

So it would go to good things? I mean really.. it's just an extra $60 a year.. there's just not much you could buy nowadays with $60.. unless you wanna get fat and buy 60 candy bars. Maybe 1 load of gas :P

I won't be surprised that the taxes on cigarettes and soda goes up either, that won't effect my house hold but it'll surely piss me off.




Those taxes are for the "bail outs".... the bail outs of companies that completely screwed up and now we have to pay up for their screw ups. Like it was our fault in the first place

And what's an extra $60 a year? The taxes on cell phones? It'll be more like $30-50 more each month.

Don't forget that those cell phone companies are going to want to make profits. And the higher the taxes the more they're gonna want for their own pocket.

Cigarettes are already taxed to death, aren't they? I think the government should get creative and tax other things... spread the taxation love around :P

BUT, cigarettes do hurt every single person that comes in contact with them.. directly and indirectly, so I'm definitely not against taxing them, but I just don't like that they keep taxing THEM when there are so many other things they could tax.



Are you talking about the American car companies? I'm completely against helping them out. I think it's a completely corrupt business that doesn't deserve our help. When other companies burn out, we definitely don't help them. Why would we make these companies special by helping them? Honestly, I didn't know Obama was going to help those car companies....what companies are you talking about?

Yes! Banks, auto industry, hospitals, mortgages (which by the way illegals can apply for so American citizens will have to help them out even though they're illegal and don't pay taxes to begin with), and some other industries as well.

Damn, Mr. Obama, why did I ever want you to win so badly?

Because he's a chocolate covered Bush.

No but seriously.. it's because all of his vague policies that were first introduced to us (which sounded amazing and great), we didn't exactly know how he would execute his plans... and now we're starting to realize what mess we got ourselves into. Other than that, he's very charismatic, even I fell for it and voted for him (even though it was more of a choice out of the lesser evil). If Ron Paul was in McCain's spot... I would have went with Ron Paul 100%

what math brought you to this conclusion that each user would be paying 30-50 dollars more a month

Because the provider makes profits off of taxes as well. They "tax" tax lol... it's one of the many ways a business makes profits.

Alright I'll be more realistic, if anything they'll charge probably an extra $20-35 a month for the average minutes used.

i said what MATH, what math did you use to get the numbers. i don't care if it's 20, 30, 40, 50 whatever, i'm asking what math did you use to get whatever number you're saying.

I don't have the math because each cell phone company has different prices at different rates with different packages, it's too much of a variable for me to sit there and try to calculate the whole thing... Think about it though, they were being hit with 50 million in taxes, now they're aiming to tax cell phone companies up to $550 million (500 million more dollars) within the next few years.

I did once get taxed on the tax I had to pay for some charge the government imposed on me. It was the point rule from tickets or something. I got four tickets, maybe five (I think I dismissed one) which amounted to about $1,000 gone for my well, mistakes. Then as if paying the tickets, court fees, and defensive driving fees weren't enough, they said I had to pay an additional fee because I acquired more than five points (which they told me about after I acquired them), which came out to something like $500 which I had to pay in three installments over three years. This is unrelated to Obama, but I just figured I would express my discontent over the ridiculous amounts of fees I have to pay for not endangering anyone on empty roads. I know I know that it's a necessary evil or whatever, but it still made me unhappy :[

$550 million sounds like a lot, but as of 2005, the US had 201 million cell phone subscribers [1]; I'm guessing that number has gone up since 2005, but let's just use the figure 201 million for the purposes of discussion. Assuming the cost of the tax is applied equally to each user, that's only $2.74 per user per year.

Now, there are a lot of factors to consider here. Probably users will be charged unequally, and the cell phone companies might use this as an excuse to charge more than just the cost of the tax. But still, I really don't see that translating to "$20-$35 per month" -- that's $240-$420 per year, which is 87x-153x the actual cost of the tax. Aside from the math, simple economics says that cell phone providers would lose customers if prices suddenly jumped by $20-$35 a month. I don't think cell phone service is an inelastic good.

A lot of people think that they need a cellphone to survive.

I totally agree.. but then again, look at how many Americans are leaving the U.S. as of now because of the economic issues. I could only imagine that cell phone companies are gonna be forced to up their prices which will actually cause a lot of their customers to look for other providers or to simply stop using cell phones. Cell phone companies are gonna be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

And I shouldn't have thrown a number out there... I was just throwing a random assumed number out there for how much more customers will be paying.