If the phone line is obligatory it’s just a way of restructuring your bill to make the headline rate look lower. (I’ve not paid for a landline for 15 years.) I’d love to use Sonic but they stopped building out the street next to me.

The bill is itemized, the voice line is $10 and the taxes on the voice line is $15.

If Sonic likes their extra $10 of margin, that's fine, but I hate paying taxes on a service I don't even want! Keep the money but give me an option to decline the voice service.

It's wild to me how you people are like "I don't mind if private business fucks me up the ass a bit but gash dang if that gubmint so much as kisses me on the cheek I'm gonna lose my shit".

If we could harness energy from cognitive dissonance, this site could power us-east-1. To be fair though, I've only seen a bit of masked capitalism defense here, and no one outright trashing municipal/coop options. I'm oddly optimistic lately, as the state of things continue, some consciousness seems to be becoming inevitable.

To be clear, my ire is entirely with Sonic.

They're lazy scheme to pad their margins nets them 1x but costs me 2.5x.

I'm not making a statement on government or taxes.

Maybe it depends on the area, but it's no problem to get service w/out voice here.