"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Originally said by Benjamin Franklin. You know what else is certain? That people in this day and age need electricity and water. If you can't clean yourself or your clothes, you'll never get a job, or hold one. If you can't cook your food, how else are you going to eat? If your power is off, then it's probably safe to say you can't afford to eat out. So why not have the government take over providing electricity and water for everyone, and charge a weekly tax out of your paycheck?
Now I realize proposing a new tax is not the most popular of ideas. You know what also isn't popular? Getting hit with a $300 or $400 electric bill because the average temperature in New York in February was 24.1 degrees, and the coldest it's been since 1934.. I'd like to point out that this does not include windchill.So of course people are using more energy to stay warm. Can you blame them? There's only so much you can do to conserve energy, but using as little light as possible won't save you $200 on your bill. But it's not just the Northern states using all that energy. The average temperature in Dallas in July of 2014 was 96 degrees. So of course those air conditioners were working pretty hard. So it's not out of the realm of possibility to think that those electric bills shot way up also. The national average electric bill in 2014 was $107.48. Divide that by four, and the weekly tax is only $26.82. So now you have no surprises coming in the mail because of a super cold, or super hot, month.
Turning the electric bill into a tax would also eliminate one major piece of assistance that gets handed out, HEAP. If everyone pays an electric tax right out of their paychecks (including unemployment) then there's no need for HEAP, because no one would get their power turned off. The money that taxpayers pay that go into programs like HEAP, can be reallocated to other areas of need. There's all kinds of complaints on social media about people getting assistance. The problem is, not everyone is scamming the system, and not everyone is able to work to get off the assistance. There's a huge gain from someone only paying $26.82 a week, as opposed to paying $142.53 a month. That extra $35 a month, $8.75 a week, means you don't have to ration out the milk, or you can provide better lunches at school, or just go one more day to payday for gas.
Ideally, however, the tax would be created so that everyone is paying what would be considered fair. The formula as to how to calculate the tax would involve the size of the residence, the total net earned the year before, and the size of the family. The family with a four bedroom home should be paying more then the person living in a studio apartment. The family that brings in $75,000 a year should be paying more then the person making $19,000 a year on minimum wage. With this formula in mind, people would still have an affordable electric bill, without any giant leaps in costs due to the weather.
No one likes paying taxes. Like Death, taxes are inevitable. So if it's something that is always going to be around, they why aren't necessities like water and electricity a tax, that can be better regulated? The power companies are just a bunch of crooks, there's no reason at all an electric company should have a net profit of of almost $4 billion dollars.
