Over the weekend, a proposal for a 20 centavo tax on every SMS sent was pushed by Senator Richard Gordon and Speaker Prospero Nograles, and was supported by Malacanang. The consumer group TXTPower quickly pointed out this step as a "slap in the face of people in the midst of crisis."
 
With nearly 1.7 to 1.9 billion text messages are sent in the country per day, the government expects to collect P340-380 million daily with a tax of 20 cents per text that the proponents said will be "spent only for health and education especially in the countryside."
 
This plan to impose taxes on SMS messages is not new. It was one of the main reasons why TXTPower was formed in 2001. That year, the International Monetary Fund proposed new taxes on SMS due to the government's ballooning deficit. As the world's texting capital, and SMS being one of the most popular and accessible means of communications, the texting public was one of the targets by the government which hopes to cash in on the texting craze. Each time, the public resisted the imposition of the tax.
 
In 2004, the anti-text tax campaign pitted mobile users against the then Speaker of the House, Jose de Venecia. With his mobile number passed around, a text message was sent by irate texters with a clear message against the text tax. The next day, a major daily put De Venecia's response to the consumer action: No more text tax.
 
In January this year, TXTPower fought for the scrapping of a proposed text tax with a "texters revolt" directed at the President's trade secretary who floated the proposal and denigrated the texting public by trying to tag texting as a "sin", comparing it with alcohol and tobacco. A day after, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said that it will not pursue the new text taxes. Had it pushed through, text messages would have cost P1.50, with P0.50 going to the government.
 
Texting and calls are already being charged with 12 percent value added tax. Overseas calls are being also slapped with an overseas communications tax. There are other ways to raise funds for education and health like reducing payments to fraudulent foreign debt, lessening unproductive expenditures and removing corruption in government.
 
Texting is the de facto messenging standard today, because it is cheap and affordable. It is important to the public. It is used principally for personal and official reasons. Overseas Filipino migrant workers (who already number around ten million) uses this tool to communicate with their families that they left at home. We also transact business using texting and send messages to lighten up moments especially in hard times like the economic crisis we are all in.
With such vital function in society, texting and mobile phones should thus be considered as a public utility. Public utilities are services that are used by the people in their daily activities and economic production. These include power, water, fuel, transportation and telecommunications services. Limiting access to these services would introduce additional difficulties that can be eased by using the services provided by the said utilities.
 
For transportation and telecommunications services, the public utility provides the infrastructure and means that enable people to take advantage of the goods and services inherent to the utility. For example, a mass transportation system provides point-to-point mobility for people in an affordable and timely manner. Telecommunications services should likewise provide the means of communications between two or more people. It involves mobile phones, the cell towers, telephone lines, remote stations and even switching terminals. If these utilities are taxed, or made unaffordable by raising their prices, it would make the daily lives of the people using them harder.
 
We as consumers want cheap, affordable, and accessible communication services. We believe that it should be treated as a public utility and must be available to everyone, and we think that is possible given with the judicious use of the rich natural and human resources our country has. Adding resources to the budget of health and education should be done by taking away unnecessary expenditure on junkets, debt service, improving tax collection and putting a control on the massive corruption in government. Taking a tax on text only passes the burden to the consumers who are using the cheapest form of communication that available to them.
 
How about text taxes? "TAX ME NOT" is already in my outbox. I am ready to send that message to Congress.