This is one of those "it's not the money, it's the principle" things. Senior citizens have been able to fish for free in Indiana. New legislation, already signed by the governor, means they will have to pay the same as everybody else, $3 a year for a license or $17 for a lifetime privilege. The reason:
The additional license enables the Indiana Division of Fish and Wildlife to collect federal reimbursement funds. Indiana receives about $8 in excise tax money from the feds for every paid license holder the state reports. Without a senior license, Indiana can't claim those federal dollars, which have been diverted to other states.
So, every $3 those greedy, freeloading old geezers save costs the state $8 from the magnanimous federal government. Why don't they just give up and die and let the rest of us get on with it?
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This is a wonderful example, on a small scale, of how obtuse our government has become. Feds, states, counties and cities all intertwined in reciprocal fiscal blackmail.
This is but part of the reason congressmen are re-elected over and over. It used to be, legislators were elected to make laws, period. Now legislators are elected to go to Washington to fight for our "piece of the pie" and it takes years to become powerful enough to start bringing back the money that was ours to begin with. Talk about back-asswards.....
We waste gazillions of dollars in this elaborate push-pull maze that is in itself, it's own industry.
We've taken a system (our republic form of governing) which was relatively simple in design, and complicated it immeasurably with regulation upon regulation, and I fear it's now too damn big to ever get back to a manageable level..
What Tim said.