Disagree. Income tax is fair ONLY if everyone pays it and almost 50% do not. User taxes are paid by EVERYONE. How much they pay depends on how much of the product/service they use.
While I agree adding user fees constitutes an additional cost of living it is nonetheless the fairest way to increase revenue.
The most fair would be to see that everyone paid income tax even if it were just 1 or 2% at the low end.
Since I do not believe that the federal government needs additional revenue at all, it's hard to say what would be a 'fair' way to increase revenue. A 'fair' way to shift the burden would be to start by eliminating the massive refunds that so many enjoy. And it's not '50% do not' pay taxes, everyone pays taxes in one form or another - that $1.25 candy bar is bought from a store that pays taxes, a distributor that pays taxes, and a company that makes it that pays taxes, and all those layers of taxes is built into the price of the candy. If you're talking purely income tax, a great many simply don't file their taxes - even if by law they could get back everything they've paid in federal income taxes through their payroll (plus a few grand more thanks to the tax credits). That same person is still paying 7% of their income in social security taxes, not to mention contributions to SDI, etc, that aren't up for refunds.
User fees are a cop out. It's called 'we're too afraid to actually cut the stuff we can't afford, so we're going to 'share the pain' with the little person by nickle and diming them with fees for services already paid for from taxes. Which means fees to access public land, fees to comply with federal laws, and it's all being wrapped up in the idea that 'well, you're causing the cost in the first place...'
It's a wrongheaded approach, the causality is inside out - a national park fee is a fee to access land that the people own through their government, who has decided to limit access based upon fees and many abstract rulings and decisions, under the misnomer that accessing that which the public owns is some kind of privilege. If the federal government wasn't spending money it didn't have and giving it away, then there wouldn't be a need for the fee in the first place.
If you took every revenue enhancement and user fee that they're likely thinking of, and then compared it to the cost of say the Labor Department, or if they were really going to go hard core, the cost of the Education department, they'd likely be equal. So let's save everyone the time and trouble (not to mention more federal workers hired to receive and process these user fees) and just shut down those two departments we can't afford.
Because, at the end of the day, we're 1.6 trillion dollars over budget. That's over $4,000 for every person in the US. The government doesn't need more fees, they need to stop spending the dang money they don't have.