From Ars Technica:

Louisiana residents may find themselves paying an extra fee on top of their regular Internet costs if the state’s House of Representatives has its way. The House voted 81 to 9 in favor of the 15-cent monthly levy Thursday, with the bill’s sponsors arguing that the money would go towards fighting Internet-related crimes in the state. …

Naturally, the measure is largely being pitched as a way to save the children. “I don’t think that 15 cents per month is too much to ask for our children’s protection,” Representative Simone Champagne (D-Jeanerette) told the House floor, according to WWL-TV.

This smells of scam. Remember when they started instituting state lotteries? Remember that they pitched it as an education initiative, that the money would go to pay for schools and stuff like that? Well, now there are so many cash-cow lotteries run by states that our kids should be going to schools that resemble palaces. Are they? No? Hmm, wonder what happened.

What happened was that the whole thing was a scam. The idea of lotteries was unpalatable at first, so they sweetened it by making it seem like it was all to benefit the little kiddies. But mostly what happened was nothing except the cash going to other purposes. What voters don’t think about is that while a special program can put more money into one specific target, like education, there is nothing stopping the state from taking away the same amount of money from the usual education budget and then using it for something else. Result: the money is used elsewhere and education got screwed. I’d love to hear about any state’s education budget getting a huge boost from lottery income and suffering no reductions elsewhere–spending more now as a percent of the budget than they got before the lotteries. Somehow I don’t think you’ll find examples of that anywhere.

So Louisiana wants to tax Internet usage to fund a program to fight crime against kids? And, what, without the tax, they would let that type of crime run rampant? Not to mention that this is completely atypical and inconsistent–taxing specific populations for specific law enforcement tasks? Do they tax your credit card to pay for investigations of credit card fraud? Do they tax gun sales to investigate gun crimes? Maybe they’ll start taxing condom sales to fund the vice squad. As far as I can figure, no other area gets a special tax to pay for any specific anti-crime task force. More reason to believe that they just want to create a new tax and need to justify it somehow. And by taxing Internet usage, they probably figure that there are enough people who don’t depend on the Internet who will be glad to hear that someone else, not them, is paying the tax.

What Louisiana, just like everyone else, should do is simply fund the program normally. But then, they’d have to raise regular taxes, which is harder. I swear, Americans are such wusses and idjits when it comes to taxes. We expect service but don’t want to pay the bill. Man up, America.