Posted on 01/25/2008 1:05:58 AM PST by curiosity
Let’s pretend that we all live in the same state: Amerachusetts. Very imaginative name, I know. Came up with it out of the blue, what can I say? And while living in Amerachusetts, I decide to get married, thus all of you need to pay the government $5. Please cough it up. *holds out hand to audience*
What? You don’t want to pay the government $5 because I’m getting married? What kind of friends are you guys anyway? Well, what about when I go get my new driver’s license with my new name on it? I’ll need everyone to hand over $10 at that point, thanks.
Come again? You don’t want to pay $10 for me to get a driver’s license? What about a hunting license and fishing license for our honeymoon? My fiance is a real outdoorsman. No on that too? Sheesh! Talk about unsupportive people!
Why don’t you guys want to pay for me to get my licenses and paperwork from the government? Because I want the item, not you, so it’s my responsibility to pay for it?
Not shockingly, this is exactly how Mitt Romney felt about fees when he became governor of Massachusetts. The fees for various services such as marriage licenses, gun registration, car registration, etc, had not been raised for years, some of them for decades. Are you being paid the same amount now that you were two decades ago? Then why expect that the fees you pay at the courthouse remain the same? The price of gas has gone through the roof, groceries are much higher, and this is only in comparison to last year! When you talk about differences in prices from ten or even twenty years ago, you’ll start to see that the same fee structure cannot possibly still cover everything.
Because if it costs the state government $43 to issue a new driver’s license, and they are only charging each person $32, where does the extra $11 come from? There is no magic hat that the government can pull that $11 out of. They have to get it somewhere. And that somewhere is from general taxes. Property taxes, sales taxes - all of these have to be raised to cover the shortage that the overly low fees have left behind.
And so when the fees don’t cover the cost of providing the service, the general public is left holding the bag. The cute little old couple down the street who got married 50 years ago is still paying for new wedding licenses every time they go to the grocery store to buy milk. Now tell me how that’s fair.
Some people wonder how raising taxes is different from raising fees. It’s all the same, right? WRONG! There is a world of difference between the two. Here it is, in a nutshell:
The fees only affect the people who want to use the service. Taxes affect everyone.
You can choose if you want to pay the fee by deciding if you want to use the service. If you don’t pay your taxes, on the other hand, you’ll end up in jail. Not exactly a choice.
So if a governor kept the cost of a fee equal to the cost of providing the service, then he would also be able to keep taxes down, because he wouldn’t be trying to cover any deficit. This means money is paid by the people who should be paying it, and lower taxes for everyone else.
This only works in theory, however, because a governor could raise fees to cover the cost of providing a service, and then still raise taxes. Luckily for Massachusettsians, Mitt Romney did not fall into that trap. He raised fees $260 million to cover the cost of services, and didn’t raise taxes at all.
Which is just the way it ought to be.
Bump.
fees are the only truly voluntary way to pay for the govt, not a sales tax, which is a tax on living.
Now if we could only bring the size of govt down to the point where 100% fees would pay for it...
Sorry, no sale.
All raising “fees” does is make people who like to drive or hunt hand over more money to scumbag politicians and their bureaucrat cronies - - in other words, people get to see more of their money get dumped down the corrupt government toilet. But I guess Mitt figured that raising “fees” would be a lot easier than reducing regulations and “paperwork”, and firing at least two-thirds of the worthless drones who populate state government.
Fees are better than taxes, but not as good as cutting spending.
Amen.
Yes, Mitt should wear his fee increases as a badge of honor along with the name given to him by the people of Mass., Mr. Fee-Fee.
Lancy, don’t you realize Reagan was severely flawed too? What’s wrong with you?
/s
Honestly, it’s beginnig to look like DU around here what with all the “I don’t cares” and tearing down of Reagan to make Romney and Bush look better.
What a sorry state of affairs.
Amen, FRiend.
Your argument makes some sense if you first accept the notion that the government has the legitimate authority to ‘permit’ you to marry, give you a ‘license’ to hunt or fish, or any number of other things that we are charged for.
What concern is it of government to know if you are married or not or whether you are getting your dinner from the wild or from the supermarket?
Have government issued driver’s licenses eliminated car accidents by assuring only competent drivers are on the road?
Each and every one of these items are just to exert some control over your life and extract some cash from your wallet.
Think of how much money the government would save if they didn’t hire people to manage a license bureau.
Don’t get me started on gun registration fees.
Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it a pretty pig but it was a nice try.
More Romney crap.
Fees are just another word for taxes placed on a narrower base, and in many cases passed on to the consumer as “the cost of doing business” such as owning a restaurant.
Harvey, you are correct. Forty years ago Alaska charged only once, every time a car was sold new, or used to register it. This paid for the paper work, prisoners made the plates. Now like all states, there is the [annual] renewal fee.
Thanks t-o.
If DL fees were about safety, we’d be tested more than once when we are 16 years old and never again.
And that goes along with these pollution inspections. If a car was made in the last 20 years and is a polluter, most likely it won’t run or run correctly, requiring service.
What concern is it of government to know if you are married or not or whether you are getting your dinner from the wild or from the supermarket?
Have government issued driver’s licenses eliminated car accidents by assuring only competent drivers are on the road?
Each and every one of these items are just to exert some control over your life and extract some cash from your wallet.
Think of how much money the government would save if they didn’t hire people to manage a license bureau.
Don’t get me started on gun registration fees.
Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it a pretty pig but it was a nice try.
Amen to that!
I don’t remember all of the details but here in Pa it was a major fiasco. After running the program and costing taxpayers and customers (paying fees) millions and millions of dollar, the program was ended and the State had to buyout the inspection stations costing lots more millions.
Can’t convince me that corruption, both in starting and in ending the program, wasn’t at the core.
And now Dem Governor Rendell wants us to match California’s emission standards for pollution equipment on cars.
Thank you. And now that we have the choir here, maybe we can put together a congregation to hear the sermon. LOL
The right thing to do was to cut bureaucrat jobs, and services that the state could not afford. Not raise Taxes or fees (which are only options liberals like Romney ever consider)
A world class administratrator would of found ways though staff reductions and automation to reduce that labor overhead.
So what was it? Mitt couldn’t transfer his cost cutting to government? Or, was he, which is the truth raise ing administration fees above their costs to fill the general treasury, which he as said he did.
The Deal was the Democrats were only too happy to have Mitt raise business fees, permits, fines and give them the money to spend.
Many of the fees, payable to the state government, are collected by town and county clerks, paid for by town and county taxes. So, in fact the administration ‘costs’ for the state are zero, but Boston gets the money.
Nice.
I don’t remember Mitt offering to pick up, or cut the towns and county in on some of the money.
Fees are better than taxes IF AND ONLY IF they are actually used for what they are collected. Unfortunately, there has been a LOT of “diversion”. For example, gas taxes are supposed to be used for roads. In fact, they are used for lots of other stuff that have nothing to do with roads (”light rail”, bicycle trails, museums, and in California, a gay park). Once they get our money, they use it for whatever they want, not what we want, or even what they promised.
I lived in CT when they bought into this scam. They contracted with a CT company, Hamilton Standard, which was owned by United Technologies, also in CT. Hamilton designed and built the exhaust sniffer, my words, to measure the pollutants. When the unit was approved small two bay drive through buildings were placed around the state, owned and maintained by Hamilton, used for your annual environmental test. They are no gone and car dealers etc do the testing.
Here in NH we never had such tests until the commies came into power, but cars older than 1996 are exempt from the tests.
Sounds reasonable to me. I do think that these fees are an underhanded tax however it makes sense that if a fee doesn't cover the cost of the service then it needs to be raised.
Who gets to determine what the cost of a service is and what say does the public have in it? The government can claim it takes 4 working hours at $25/hour to process your fishing license so we're going to charge you $100 for your fishing license. We all know most of that stuff is computerized and the processing is most likely untouched by human hands, but if the government claims it takes 4 hours at $25/hr., who can dispute it?
Both taxes and fees are arbitrary and provide no incentive for efficiency.
He has nothing to apologize for in this regard. On the contrary, he ought to wear his fee increases as badge of honor.Wrong. The unfortunate lie inherent in Romney's fee-raising is written right onto MGL Ch 140, Sect. 129b PP 1A. Romney learned from Dukakis and used fees as a way to get around raising taxes. He raised the fee 300% ($25 to $100) and then: $50 of the fee shall be deposited in the General Fund.
Exactly. When it comes to government programs, a scorched earth policy is best.
Because if it costs the state government $43 to issue a new driver’s license...
If it costs that much, then eliminate the bloated bureaucracy, don’t increase fees.
My brother is a paramedic in Taxachusetts and his fee for his annual certification went from $30 to $150. He is currently looking to relocate to North Carolina, where the state income tax, property taxes, and licensing fees are a whole lot lower.
DING DING DING
:)
Exactly.
Fees Only Accounted For A Small Percent Of The Closure Of The Nearly $3 Billion Budget Gap.
"Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said some of the fees that kicked in during Romney's first year had been approved before he became governor. ... 'When Governor Romney took office, he faced a $3 billion deficit,' Fehrnstrom said. 'He balanced the budget primarily through spending cuts and reforms. Fee increases [$260 million] accounted for approximately 10 percent of the solution, and they were not broad-based by any means.'"
Governor Romney:"Well, they call one a fee and one a tax for a reason. The reason is because with the fee, it is applied directly to people who get a particular service. It's not a service that you have to have, but a service that you'd like to have. And so we did not raise fees on things like car registration or driver's licenses because pretty much everybody has to have that. But some of our fees... for instance, there's a fee for putting a billboard announcing where a McDonalds or Burger King is on the interstate. Those fees haven't been raised in sometimes many, many years, and so we raised them in order to keep up with inflation or to keep up with the cost of providing the service. But I readily acknowledge that we have a $3 billion budget gap. Our fee increases accounted for about $260 million of additional revenue, and that was helpful for us. We didn't raise them except our first year, but it was a source of revenue, and it brought in line the fee that we charge for certain services. And some cases, the cost of providing it." (Linda Douglass Q&A with Gov. Romney, 9/28/2007)
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