Linc Madison <rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu> (04/07/90)
Ah, leave it to the city of Berkeley to come up with an innovative
(but illegal) source of revenue. The city has a 6.5% Utility Tax,
which is applied to phone charges as well as other utilities. I
recently got my Sprint bill, and found that on $0.95 of in-state
calls, I was charged $2.10 in local tax. That's 221% tax rate.
Either that, or the tax was applied to out-of-state calls as well.
But the city of Berkeley has no authority to tax those calls, in part
because they have no power to prohibit me from making them. (The
power to tax is legally subsidiary to the power to destroy.)
I've called Sprint customer service, which is dutifully "looking into
it." I can't say for sure yet whether Berkeley told Sprint to do
this, or whether Sprint just programmed the billing computer wrong,
but in this case it makes a difference of more than 5% to my phone
bill, since almost all of my calls are either intra-LATA or
interstate.
Mayor Tom McEnery of San Jose proposed applying that city's tax to
interstate calls a couple of years ago, but finally backed down when
the city attorney's office explained that it was unequivocally illegal
to do so, so I have great confidence in both Berkeley and Sprint to be
possible sources of this illegal billing.
Linc Madison = rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu
UUCP: ...!ucbvax!euler!rmadison