To Be Announced...

For those of you that switched to satellite during the Sinclair/Mediacom dustup, I hope you're enjoying the 10-dollar a month rebate. Democrats in the Iowa house, though, want to make things more fair and competitive between cable and satellite.

Which in Orwellian Newspeak, means raising taxes.

Bill would add 5 percent to satellite television bills

Lawmakers are considering a 5 percent "equalization tax" on satellite bills, which would be similar to the 5 percent franchise fee currently added to the bills of many cable customers.

The tax would cost Iowa's estimated 200,000 families that use satellites an extra $2.5 million to $3 million each year, according to information from the Iowa Cable and Telecommunications Association.

Satellite users, such as customers of DirecTV, for years have avoided paying the franchise fee, which has traditionally been viewed as payment to use city-owned rights of way to lay cable lines.

I guess they have to call it an "equalization tax" because nobody in their right minds believes that a small dish on the roof of your house is in any way using "city-owned rights of way"...

There are no poles, lines, streets, cables...or any other possible difficulty posed to cities for putting a dish on your own property and using your own supply of electricity to run it. Hmmm.

Still...raising taxes is usually the fairest thing to do since all those people switched to satellite and are no longer paying the franchise taxes that cities impose on land-based cable companies.

You see, the guvmint wants to "wet their beak" a little.

Des Moines, for example, collected more than $1.7 million from the fees in 2002. Last year, the city collected roughly $400,000 less.

Advocates, however, say the tax would create more fair competition. Franchise fees put cable companies at a disadvantage, they say.

"It is not a new tax," said Tom Graves, a lobbyist for the Iowa Cable and Telecommunications Association, which works closely with Mediacom and other cable providers in the state. "It will bring taxes back that have gone away from cities."

Democrats have a mandate, you see...

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Labels: mediacom