Elect a Republican, get higher taxes.
Just like Trump, Paul TenHaken campaigned as a conservative, but now that he’s in charge of Sioux Falls, TenHaken’s administration is pushing a 140% tax increase on cable users:
The city is looking to increase the franchise fee from 2.5 percent to 5 percent and add an additional 1 percent fee to pay for the CityLink channel. This would more than double the current fees.
The proposal would increase bills for both Midco and Vast Broadband subscribers in Sioux Falls. The franchise fee is basically rent paid by the cable companies to connect cable to homes and use the right of way to run cable lines. The cable companies pass this fee onto the customer.
“It’s called a franchise fee, but in effect, you’ll hear a lot of people call it a tax because it works just like a tax,” Midco lawyer Pat Mastel told the Sioux Falls city council on Tuesday during an informational meeting [Michael Geheren, “City Fees on Cable in Sioux Falls May More Than Double,” KELO-TV, 2019.05.22].
Sioux Falls is making less from cable users, since more people are deciding cable TV adds little value to their lives (and as I wrote that sentence, I got up to move from a waiting area where a fellow citizen switched on Mike Pompeo droning lies from the idiot Fox-box):
But with fewer people subscribing to cable due to online streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, the city of Sioux Falls is feeling a strain on the yearly payment it’s come to rely on from Midco. For example, the city expects the 2019 payment to be about $916,000, down from a high of $964,984 in 2017 [Joe Sneve, “Cable Bills in Sioux Falls Could Be Going Up as Midco Braces for Higher City Fees,” that Sioux Falls paper, 2019.05.21].
An industry is dying, so let’s tax it harder and make it die faster! If TenHaken wants to be a true Trumpublican, he’ll follow up by offering a subsidy to prop up the industry he’s damaging.
But even as fewer people are watching cable, TenHaken wants to impose that bonus sixth percent tax to support the city’s public access cable channel. I have to ask: why keep spending money on a cable channel when you can reach more viewers at less expense via the city YouTube channel?
At least Tax-Raisin’ TenHaken won’t look bad when he goes to the mayors’ conferences. Most other big South Dakota towns levy on their cable providers the full 5% allowed by federal law:
But TenHaken was just in Aberdeen a month ago bragging to the pious businessmen’s prayer breakfast about what a great conservative he is and contrasting himself with that evil liberal Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen. Now Mayor TenHaken says he wants Sioux Falls to be just like Aberdeen, with higher cable taxes. So much for that messaging.
I’m telling you, Paul, if you’d just come out and be a liberal instead of pandering to the conservative impulses that your marketing studies say are your path to power, you could live a more honest life.
Given inflation and new demands, taxes at times have to be raised; and since the GOP runs this state, they are ususally left with the task of raising them.
However, with that said, I cannot help but notice that their tax raising is always of a regressive sense and in absence of any true progressive nature. So what the GOP is against is not taxation, rather they are against progressive taxation, but they will never admit it. Because the GOP would rather tax the little guy and gal, than the ownership class which keeps our GOP politicians in office.
Regressivity! Bingo, John KC! 5% boost for basic cable access has no impact on the millionaires in their mansions; it hits the working class harder, just like the sales tax. TenHaken and the Republicans never consider taxing wealth where wealth is.
I wonder how high the franchise fee is here in Madison. We have Midco and Vast… except at my apartment which is only wired for Midco. And even though Madison is about 40-or-so miles removed from Sioux Falls, we still get CityLink in HD. The Madison community “channel” is just a rebroadcast of KJAM 1390.
If Cable companies want to stop people from moving to streaming services, find ways to lower the prices of the packages, and let subscribers choose the channels they want, ala carte. The standard cable packages contain lots of channels, and depending on peoples tastes, many of those channels will go unwatched. My package contains ESPN and several sports channels, yet I rarely watch sports on TV. Should ESPN be in a separate package for people who do watch sports? Why should I be forced to pay for ESPN if I don’t watch it?