LETTERS: PHONE TAX NOT VOTED BY CONGRESS

To the editor:

According to the Congressional Record and as reported by the Southeast Missourian, because of changes enacted by the Republican majority in Congress some 48 million Americans will no longer pay any federal income taxes starting in the 1998 tax year. That's a third of all the taxpayers in the United States. Why is this? New dependent tax credits for all lower-income parents. In fact, some families with three or more children will actually receive money from the government even though they have paid no income taxes for the year. The dependent tax credit will increase by an additional amount for the 1999 tax year, which will add many more millions of lower-income families to the rolls of Americans who owe nothing and also to those who will receive money without having paid taxes. Americans having incomes above $100,000 a year will now be burdened with paying 62 percent of all the personal income taxes the IRS collects.

The Constitution vests the power of taxation and appropriations in the Congress. With that said, let us now place the blame for those high tax years, which resulted in the huge deficit, where it rightfully belongs: right in the hands of the Democrat-controlled Congress. The Constitution does not give the president the power to write or amend tax laws and then turn around and sign them into law. The Democrats have blamed the Republicans for creating the deficit during the Reagan-Bush administrations when actually it was the other way around, because the tax-and-spend Democrats controlled Congress during the Reagan-Bush administrations. We hear statements like "saving Social Security from the Republicans." I believe we have to start rethinking of just whom we are saving Social Security from.

Earlier I stated that only Congress has the vested power by the Constitution to write our tax laws. However, something has occurred during the Clinton-Gore administration that seems to circumvent that authority. In January 1998, without the legal power to do so, the Clinton administration demanded that Americans pay a new tax on their long-distance telephone calls. This tax was dubbed the Gore tax, because it is the pet project of Vice President Al Gore. It will cost taxpayers $2.65 billion the first year. Gore demanded a language change in the FCC Telecommunication Act of 1996 for the sole purpose of placing a hidden tax on everyones telephone bill without any controls by Congress. This language change allowed the FCC the authority to set up a private corporation called the Universal Service Administration Co. and even authorized the company to set the rate of the tax itself. The chief executive officer of this company, a former Gore aide, receives an annual salary in excess of $200,000. The Clinton-Gore administration pressured phone companies from truthfully reporting the tax to the consumers.

In response to this political pressure, some phone companies hide the tax by incorporating the tax into the basic per-minute rate. Some phone companies have, however, chosen to separately itemize the tax on their customers' bills and are labeling the tax as "universal connectivity charge." When this first appeared on my statement, I called my long-distance server on the meaning of the term and was informed that it was some form of Gore tax. Please call and ask your congressional representative for more information on this subject.

J.D. BALTHUS

Jackson