In an ever-expanding effort to stuff their coffers with more taxpayer money, the state of Massachusetts approved a new “satellite tax” last summer. As a refugee who was born and raised in Massachusetts, I am very familiar with the state government’s appetite for taxpayer dollars.

It appears that the top satellite TV providers are not about to take this move lying down. In a rare spirit of cooperation, DISH Network and DirecTV have joined to file suit against Massachusetts, calling the new 5% tax “discriminatory.”

The state does impose a tax on cable TV companies and probably other utilities as well, since their lines have to be routed along streets and roads that are considered public property. The satellite companies believe ” and I agree ” that since they are not making use of public property, there are no grounds for the state to impose such a tax.

If the state of Massachusetts is going to start taxing the electromagnetic spectrum, they better figure out a way to start taxing people who watch or listen to any broadcast that is not carried by wires. Perhaps that can add a little bit onto their “excise tax” that all owners of motor vehicles have to pay (at least when I lived there) if the vehicle in question is equipped with a radio!

Apparently, greedy politicians in Florida, Ohio and Tennessee have imposed similar taxes on their residents. Legal action against those states is pending.

Hopefully, the courts will see the flawed logic behind these taxes and abolish them.

I suppose this is what we should expect from politicians when the economy tanks. People are losing their jobs and their homes and they decide to raise taxes. That will be a big help for a lot of struggling families, I’m sure.

It appears that just about all the big pay-TV services will be raising prices this year. As reported in the Boston Globe, Comcast, Verizon, Dish Network and DirecTV all have price increases planned.

Comcast’s prices are reported to be going up around 4 percent while Verizon plans a 12 percent increase, by far the largest increase among all the players in this report. Verizon does report, however, that prices are locked in for two years after sign-up so current customers should not be affected by the increase.

Of the two satellite TV giants, DirecTV has the slightly larger increase planned at 4 percent while Dish Network reports that their increase will be around 3 percent.

Dish Network has plans to freeze prices for some of their most popular programming packages including the DishDVR Advantage package but I have seen some conflicting information regarding exactly which packages will be included in the freeze and the duration of the freeze.

Dish Network, to their credit, seems to be the only ones talking about freezing prices for some programming packages while increasing the price for some others.

This demonstrates pretty well why I like Dish Network so much. They announced today that they are freezing prices until 2009 for some of their most popular programming prices.

I’ve talked about Dish Network prices before and about how the price has gone up only slightly since I first signed up back in 1998.

The price freeze includes the DishDVR Advantage packages which start at $39.99 per month which makes it a pretty good time to sign up for Dish Network since you will know the price will not be going up for a year.

If you don’t have a DVR yet, it is a great time to get one.

As far as the competition goes, when DirecTV was asked about their pricing plans for 2008, the company said: “We are in the latter stages of evaluating price structure for 2008, but don’t currently have any plans to freeze prices this year.”

In their usual style, Comcast, when asked about their plans for pricing said the company will increase its video costs during this year by around 5 percent on average, although the average customer bill, including Internet and telephone, would rise by around 3.1 percent.

Since I’m a Comcast Internet customer (it’s my only choice for broadband Internet in my area!) I guess I can expect my bill to go up yet again. Gee, I’m shocked to hear that! Not really.

Cablevision and Verizon also have plans to raise prices.

If your tempted to jump on the bandwagon and sign up for Dish Network and get in on this price freeze, see my Dish Network Deals page for the best deal on Dish Network satellite TV service.

A while back I talked about the price increase that Comcast warned me about in a recent letter. At the time, I thought my bill would go up from around $43 to $57 or so. Well, it turned out to be a bit worse than I thought.

Today I received my latest Comcast bill and found out that they are sticking it to me even worse than I thought. As you can see from the included copy of my bill, I am now paying $62 for a month of their high-speed Internet service.

Keep in mind that this is a very basic level of high-speed service with a speed of about 4 Megabits. That’s at the low end of speed options these days. They are offering some service that is supposed to be as high as 8 Megabits.

They also offer a service call PowerBoost, which can boost download speeds as high as 16 Megabits depending on the current level of other traffic on their system. In fact, I actually had this feature enabled on my connection for a week or two some time ago but it was shut off, since it is not available with the lowly level of service I am paying $62 a month for.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Cable TV sucks and Comcast sucks.

They can penalize me all they want for choosing to be an Internet only customer. I will keep my Dish Network forever. Unless Dish Network gives me a reason to cancel it, of course.

Wow, a $19 price increase is one hefty increase. I’ve never been great at math, but from where I come from that’s darn close to a 50% increase.

You can reference one of my old posts if you’d care to see how much my Dish Network bill went up over the course of 8 years or so.

Since one of the biggest problems I always had with cable TV was the frequent increases in price. It seemed to me that they were raising the prices with every other bill I received. I’m sure it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was still too often for me.

Although I can recall one or two price increases since I’ve been a Dish Network customer, I wondered exactly how much my Dish Network bill has gone up since I’ve had the service.

Most of the time I kick myself for being a bit of a pack rat when it comes to keeping various statements and bills for years, but this time I was happy to be able to locate a Dish Network bill from January, 1999 — only 3 months after I first became a customer.

Here is my bill from 1999:

And here is my bill from August of this year:

As you can see from the 1999 bill above and a recent one below that, my Dish Network bill has gone up only $2.81 cents in the 8 years I have been a customer.

Considering that they have added a few new channels to my programming package over the years, that seems like a pretty fair deal to me.