Berkeley city councilman, Gordon Wozniak suggested a tiny tax on email in a debate on how to save their historic Allston Way post office.  And George Skelton at the L.A. Times thinks it’s an excellent idea.  He doesn’t see it as a way to save the post office so much as a way to cut down on spam.  Although, he ponders how such a tax might be used to bring happiness to people (just as all our other taxes do so well):

Or just to help replace the tax revenue lost by technology putting people out of work. That was the idea of the Canadian economist — Wozniak’s inspiration — who first raised the notion of a bit tax back in 1997 in a speech at Harvard Law School.

Yeah, just what we need is another welfare program for all the poor souls who are suffering from new technology.   By that logic, we would all be much better off if we still lived in caves.

You have to love the irony of taxing the technology that is threatening to obsolete the postal service in order to keep the postal service in business.