I had a bill come today.

I think the bill illustrates just what is wrong with the country. Sometimes, I hear people justify income taxes as opposed to a national sales tax saying that a national sales tax is just unfair.

The truth is, if we only had to pay income tax it wouldn’t be so bad but, there are so many other taxes we wind up paying each and every day and often we have just become so numb to everything we don’t even begin to realize just how much money goes out of one’s pocket in taxes.

Anyway, so I got a bill from my long-distance carrier on my home phone. I haven’t used the home phone as much for long distance since nights and weekends long distance on the cell is free.

Here’s what the bill was:

One call - for one minute (it was probably less than a minute as I remember who I was calling and if I remember correctly they didn’t pick up but somehow I got charged for it anyway.

The total for the bill is $3.70!

...but wait there’s more. The charge for the phone call was .40¢

0.40 phone call
______________

0.99 carrier cost recovery
1.76 in-state access recovery
________________________________

0.10 state gross receipts surcharge
0.10 county sales tax
0.13 state sales tax
0.13 carrier universal service charge
0.09 federal excise tax
__________________________

So, a 40¢ call wound up costing me an additional $3.30 in other charges. F**k fuzzy math! Imagine going to the store, paying $2.20 for a quart of milk and paying $18.50 in additional charges (I did the math, proportionally that’s what it works out to).

Something is very wrong.

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