The 'S' stands for sham
The city phone tax proposition is a far cry from honest.
Let there be no mistake. The political power elite of the city of Los Angeles is so anxious for you to pass Proposition S that they're willing to ride to victory on bad-faith efforts. Nearly every element of Proposition S, which is on the ballot for the Feb. 5 election, is engineered to baffle a negligent voter. And you can start with the name.
Officially, Proposition S is called by this disingenuous and elliptical mouthful: "Reduction of Tax Rate and Modernization of Communications Users Tax." That sounds confusing, but mostly it sounds like less taxes, doesn't it? Silly you.
This "reduction" and "modernization" actually extends and potentially expands the city's tax on communication technologies, mostly with cellphones in mind. It also gives the city the right to collect taxes that two courts have found it couldn't collect without your approval.
In the last two years, courts determined that the way the city was cashing in on your cellphone calls violated Proposition 218, which requires voter approval for new taxes. (In case you're wondering, the city didn't immediately stop collecting any questionable dollars.) Now more court cases are pending about other technicalities related to the tax. If enough of you vote yes, Proposition S will outflank the court cases, establish the requisite voter approval and open the door for taxing more "communication services" in the future. If the city were playing fair, Proposition S would be labeled "Legalizing and Extending the Phone Tax"-- except voters would never go for that. So the proponents included a meaningless 1% drop -- from 10% on various services to 9% -- so they could call the thing a "tax reduction."
The proposition was born in bad faith. In order to get it on the Feb. 5 primary ballot, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council had to declare the city to be facing a fiscal emergency. But what emergency? It's so extreme the $178,000-a-year City Council members voted for a pay raise for 22,000 of the city's workers, just in time for the holidays.
If voters get beyond the hype and the title, they'll see that Proposition S is hardly a reduction in taxes. From the proposition's Section 21.1.3 in the voter information pamphlet:
"(a) There is hereby imposed a tax upon every Person with a billing or service address in the City of Los Angeles who uses Communications Services. ..."
Or how about this one from paragraph (d)?
