Wasn't it just Friday when I was worrying about government wanting to start charging us for services such as police and fire protection on a per-use basis? Shows how little imagination I have:
But last July, Winter Haven became one of a few dozen cities in the country to start charging “accident response fees.” The idea is to shift the expense of tending to and cleaning up crashes directly to at-fault drivers. Either they, or their insurers, are expected to pay.
Such cash-per-crash ordinances tend to infuriate motorists, and they often generate bad press, but a lot of cities are finding them hard to resist. With the economy flailing and budgets strained, state and local governments are being creative about ways to raise money. And the go-to idea is to invent a fee — or simply raise one.
Ohio's governor has proposed a budget with more than 150 new or increased fees, including a fivefold increase in the cost to renew a livestock license, as well as larger sums to register a car, order a birth certificate or dump trash in a landfill. Other fees take aim at landlords, cigarette sellers and hospitals, to name a few.
Wisconsin's governor, James E. Doyle, has proposed a charge on slaughterhouses that would be levied on the basis of each animal slaughtered. He also wants to more than triple the application charge for an elk-hunting license to $10, an idea that has raised eyebrows because the elk population in the state is currently too small to allow an actual hunting season.
Washington's mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, has proposed a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 a month, to be added to electric bills, that would cover the cost of operating and maintaining the city's streetlights. New York City recently expanded its anti-idling law to include anyone parked near a school who leaves the engine running for more than a minute. Doing that will cost you $100.
A "streetlight user fee" -- now, that's creative. Such "fees" are just a not-so-clever way of disguising the increase of taxes to an abominable level, and you'll notice that the general fees paid by everybody -- even those who don't use a particular service -- are never deceased.
Comments
This can really be traced back to one simple problem: The morons we have continued to re-elect over and over again continue to spend irresponsibly and we continue to allow them to hose us over and over again.
Use tax, sales tax, taxes tax, it will never end until the morons in the legislature are replaced and then TERM LIMITED to avoid making a freaking career out of a part time job.
The House and Senate positions were never meant to be life long careers, ever. Now getting a few of them with the testicular fortitude to introduce term limit legislation is gonna take an act of God, but we have to begin sometime.
If we continue to do the same thing over and over (i.e. vote for incumbents) we will surely see the same results over and over.
Aren't we the real morons here? All we really have to do to end an elected official's tenure is vote for his or her opponent, a practice in which I confess to have engaged over several past election cycles simply in order to achieve some "turnover." Of course my vote contends against others (including those who vote based strictly according to party affiliation whether or not that party holds the office) so whether the desired ejection of an incumbent is achieved relies upon a sufficient number of my fellow citizens also voting to oppose incumbency. We're all "shareholders" in the government; if we don't like the direction the board is following, we can fire them. We can also dismantle the two-party system, while we're at it, and prohibit private financing of elections.
As far as increasing fees is concerned, once again, we the taxpayers are the shareholders of the enterprise, and we the taxpayers can demand accountability by insisting that every line item increase in the budget be publicly justified and submitted to a referendum prior to its being imposed, if that is our wish. This may require amending the state constitution, but that can certainly be accomplished as well.