I totally agree. And I support the Obama plan to tax net worth. People like Warren Buffet who are eating on golden dinner plates ought to pay more. The 'net worth' tax where a wealthy person pays 10% of his/her net worth each year until they are penniless is the way to go. Just think of it, no more wealthy rock stars or movie actresses. John Travolta's airport would belong to the people and he can eat at the soup kitchen. With the net worth tax in place, the excess dollars can be redistributed to those who would vote democrat in all future elections ( as long as they have money to eat and gamble at the nearest casino and that their kids all get chicken nuggets for lunch at school ).
Bottom line ---- the net worth tax would be quicker and less painful to get to a fully socialistic state. Might as well lay back and enjoy it....
sarc/off
What's it like over there on the Dark Side?
A sophisticated MODERN user fee system would simply allocate the costs of a government service to the users, each of whom would pay an appropriate share.
GIve you an example of such a user fee ~ POSTAGE!
Well, that was an obvious one. Now, how about this. People mail pornography ~ not as much these days as formerly (due to the internet) ~ but they do, and within that group are several fairly large businesses who mail a lot of porn.
The law requires that in case of a complaint from some downstream "user" or "recipient" the address of that complainant be added to a list of complainants. At the end of the year (or quarterly) the list is "sold" to the major porn producers ~ who then delete those addresses from from their files.
The people who need the list end up paying for it. USPS recovers its costs for producing the list. The people who don't want the porn then get dropped from the mailing lists and everybody is happy.
There's no reason most of Commerce and the Labor Departments can't be handled the same way. HHS certainly is open to that sort of thing ~ my goodness, look at their customer base ~ hospitals, doctors, medical insurance companies, state governments, etc. That's where the money is. Why go after Aunt Mary who makes $30,000 per year and lives in a shack in Mississippi when you can tap Johns Hopkins?
Let's look at the EXPENSE SIDE of government and the people who generate that expense to see who ought to pay the costs.
Note, when it comes to "grants", they'd just disappear ~ anything requiring a "grant" would turn into a state responsibility.
BTW, the federal highway funding system is also a "user fee" based operation. It needs "toned up" a bit to make it more equitable of course, but there's no reason for anyone's income to be tapped to build highways when there's all that traffic to pay.
We can even allocate the cost incurred by DOD in defending the seaways for commercial traffic ~