Cellphones are easy targets for taxation, because they have gone from being luxuries to necessities for families. And the more cellphones your family has, the more you’ll be taxed. It’s clearly not an equitable distribution of the tax burden.

Raising taxes on the cell phones is just another of Vanderhoef’s ploys to find more avenues of revenue, but it’s clearly not well thought out. Cellphone use is growing so quickly that it makes a perfect target for municipalities to target for tax revenue. It’s bad government when your lawmakers identify something that has become a necessity and then finds a way to tax the hell out of them. If you need to add a tax, it’s better that it is a luxury tax or a vice tax.

And don’t you believe for a second that the tax will go to fund E911. In Chicago, they charged a $2.50 cell phone tax and the money went to pay for security for the 2016 Summer Olympics. And since they didn’t win the bid for the Olympics, do you think that money then went to E911? Nope, it’s now in the general fund.

Closer to home, the City of Syracuse imposed a $1.20 tax on mobile phones, but only $.0.05 went to the E911 service. The rest went to the city’s general fund. And families with two or more cellphones were taxed inequitably by the city.

Furthermore, this year, an FCC report showed that most state and municipal taxing authorities used cell phone taxes for general revenue, not for E911. Don’t believe that the cellphone tax is because cellphone users are burdening the system, it’s an outright distortion by Scott Vanderhoef.