Levying tax on VoIP services is very much unreasonable. It is meaningless on the part of the government to do so. It creates lots of problems to the people. The government has to think about the tax and atleast reduce them to such an extant that people could afford.

Actually, the tax was mischaracterized as a tax reduction, but this was really an outright lie.

Previously, an illegal 10% tax had been imposed on some other types of phone service without complying with the mandated vote. The city had been sued to overturn this obviously illegal act, and was in the process of having its rear end handed to it in court. So, they put this on the ballot, claiming it was a “tax reduction”, not only adding a 9% tax to items which had never been taxed previously even under the illegal regime, but for which there was no originally valid tax to begin with!

Why not do the same thing again from now on? Just impose every tax without complying with any legal requirements (say, 20% on pink cell phones on the first Tuesday of the month), and then you can campaign for a slightly lower percentage version, tax a whole set of new things (say, 19% on EVERYTHING), and call it a reduction!

Personally, this has in all seriousness totally destroyed my faith in our government and system of elections – if they can so utterly misrepresent something on the ballot itself, the process has been so corrupted that elections are meaningless, and we have become a banana republic.

— Jim in L.A.

Hmmm. This may not mean anything, but notice the publication date on the article? April 1.

Note that L.A. already had a 10% tax on regular landline and cellphone calls, and as part of this measure this rate was reduced to 9%. What? A tax reduction? Only in California!