Last updated April 12, 2019
The City Council in North Platte in the United States is considering putting a tax on used cell phone owners. Councilman Jerry Stoll announced on Tuesday that the City Council is considering making alterations to an existing city ordinance in order to modernize it and put a communications tax on those who use cell phones.
The alteration would be to make up for the fact that the use of landlines has dropped considerably in recent years and so a tax of five per cent could be placed on new and old cell phone users, a move that could generate up to $480,000 for the city. Stoll claims that the tax could be used to help reduce property taxes in the area by as much as eight per cent. “I don’t think there are very many people in North Platte who would say, “The property tax in North Platte is too high, but that’s okay because we don’t have a cell phone tax”, he argues.
Councilwoman Judy Pederson was also in agreement with the idea, noting that “The more diverse streams of generating revenue we have, the better”, describing it as just a “user fee”.
The proposal did not go down too well with the local Mayor, Marc Kaschke, who feels the city needs to cut spending rather than impose yet more taxes on the populace, or with Councilman Jim Carmen, who says that the tax would be an unfair burden on large families who had multiple cell phones.