Politics & Power Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

By calling telephones a "virtual necessity", Mike Fitzpatrick is doing more than defending consumers; he is trying to collapse an outdated moral category. Luxury taxes are politically tolerable because they imply discretion and indulgence. Fitzpatrick yanks the phone out of that frame and plants it in the realm of basic infrastructure, closer to electricity than entertainment. The hyphenated insistence - "not a luxury" - reads like a legislative underlining, a cue to voters that the government is mislabeling their everyday life.

The sharper move is how he treats the tax's destination: "flow into the general fund". That's a polite phrase with a pointed insinuation. General funds are where money goes to lose its fingerprints. In other words, this isn't a targeted fee paying for a targeted service; it's a quiet siphon that becomes indistinguishable from everything else Congress wants to do. The subtext is mistrust: the tax persists not because it makes sense, but because it is easy, habitual, and politically invisible.

"Once temporary" is the real indictment. Fitzpatrick is tapping into a familiar American resentment: emergency measures that never die, government improvisations that harden into permanent extraction. The context is the long-running federal excise tax on telephone service, originally justified as a wartime revenue measure, later surviving on inertia. By citing "almost $6 billion" and naming "small businesses and families", he builds a coalition of the supposedly responsible and the vulnerable, turning repeal into a pocketbook issue and a character test for governance: can Washington ever let go of a revenue stream once it has it?