Our distinguished parliament has suggested a new brilliant idea to shut us all up. They want to impose a one fils tax on each minute of cellular phone conversation, regardless of the destination of the call.

واقترحت “قانونية النواب” من اجل تحقيق موارد مالية للصندوق فرض اقتطاعات جديدة على فاتورة الهواتف الخليوية بواقع فلس واحد على كل دقيقة من كل مكالمة هاتفية داخلية أو خارجية أو أرضية، وفلسين اثنين مما كان يسمى فلس الريف والذي تحصله شركات الكهرباء العاملة في المملكة من المشتركين على أن يبقى الفلس الثالث الذي تحصله هذه الشركات مخصصا لكهرباء الريف

Source

I was just thinking this morning about our telecom bliss in Jordan, and how we have five independent telecommunications companies and how we can make phone calls for reasonable money and talk to each other through reliable networks, even if we are hungry and cold.

After the government enforced a law to collect one JD annually from each and every phone line in the country (fixed and cellular) to support public universities, now we are faced with an ADDITIONAL tax on our airtime. And for what?

To provide the government with finances to support the ambiguous, still-in-the-works “Fund for Animal Protection.” What is that anyway? What’s even worse is that the resourceful, new parliament House of Representatives has suggested this tax idea!

This is the same government which has so far failed in generating money from sustainable projects, has liberalized our markets thus causing major price increases, has NOT provided sufficient and adequate alternatives for Jordanians to lead decent lives, has slapped public sector employees with a, what?, 50 JD raise in the face of the tremendous inflation, and has not intervened yet to assist the poor lot in the private sector.

This is the government which sees you, 3azeezi al muwaten, as its prime, Grade A, kharoof with a belly full of money. After starving you and leaving you in the cold, now the government is about to tell you to SHUT UP. In the coming few years, you will not be able to even afford complaining on the phone about gas and food prices.

What is that I hear? Ah, the Silence of the Lambs.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!



This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Jordan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.