A friend sent this list of new driving fines in the budget-squeezed state of California today.
NOTE: This turned out to be a hoax. Thanks to Rupert for pointing it out below. The original list can be found on Snopes here, except that in the version I received it was updated for 2008 and of course was built around the kernel of truth that the hands-free cellphone law begins today. I'm leaving only one bogus "new law" that is mentioned in the diary and one that is largely true.
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Block intersection: $485
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- As of 07/01/08, cell phone use must be "hands free" while driving.
Ticket is $285. They will be looking for this like crazy - easy money for the police department.
My topic today is not these fines, but that last boldface sentence.
There are more than one ways to skin a cat, and for the last thirty years conservatives throughout the world have been especially adept at raising government revenue without resorting to the most forthright and usually fairest way of doing so: taxation.
What matters to political success, conservatives realized, is the state of the economy while one is in office -- a lesson that the first President Bush didn't learn and the second President Bush has completely ignored -- which means that if one can raise revenues in ways that don't leave people seeing the bruises, one can get away with a lot. Let's review some of the ways one can raise revenue without raising taxes.
(1) Sell off government property. This was a favorite of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. (Reagan, here, was no slouch at it either, but we had more land and fewer government-owned enterprises to sell.) England had a substantially socialized economy prior to Thatcher. Thatcher balanced her budget without raising taxes by selling off government property -- including enterprises -- and giving average people a small ownership stake (much like the one those of us with retirement accounts invested in the market have of U.S. industry. The problem, of course, is that having sold something off once to balance the budget one year, you can't sell it off again to balance the budget the next year. And, of course, once you no longer own something, you can't control it -- whether it's ensuring that enterprises follow pro-social environmental or labor policies or that beachside property remains open to the public. Excise taxes and drilling rights are other examples of government selling off its property; by the time the public realizes that it got a raw deal, the culprits are safely out of office and ensconced on corporate boards.
(2) Borrow. This one is probably familiar to you: a favorite of Reagan's, even more of a favorite of G. W. Bush's. You allow the Chinese to lend us money to prop up the economy, the Saudis to keep us on the hook for oil, and so long as you're not in office when the bill comes do you can scream a stream of blood out of your eyes at whoever is in when the chips fall. (This is why one of the top priorities of an Obama Administration has to be ensuring that all records of what actually happened during these eight years are produced. We have a good idea who is to blame; we need to make sure that the public does as well.)
(3) Printing money. We're deficit spending, of course, which is what this phrase usually implies, but thanks to the reserves we built after the first year of the Clinton Administration (seven fat years that, lo and behold, did get us through about seven lean years!), we haven't noticed it quite as badly as could have been on the macroeconomic level. Now, though, we're seeing not only inflation among necessities (which may be offset -- unless you're like most people in the country -- in deflation in expensive electronics and housing), but devaluation more generally. The smart money is out of dollars and into Euros and pounds sterling -- but that's a luxury those of us who live on essentially a cash economy can't readily afford. China -- which likes Bush's hands-off policy and does not like the likes of Pelosi -- won't disengage the yuan from the dollar yet. Instead, it's done something smart and unexpected: hoarding commodities (like rice), which will increase in value relative to currency. Great thinking, unless you have to do something like eat.
These, though, are mostly approaches that are taken on the national level. What can states do, especially if they, like California, have somehow boxed themselves in to the point where they can't raise taxes without a 2/3 majority vote? How will they get along?
(4) Just fine people and charge them fees. And so this is what you see happening today. It's only a tax if you incur it for doing something that you have to do, like earn, or spend, or live somewhere, or die. If you did something permissible, legal, and optional -- like register a car, drive the most direct route between two points, register for college -- then instead of a tax, it's a fee (or a toll), and the conservatives never promised not to raise fees. (That fees come out of the same bank account as taxes seems lost on them.) If you did something wrong, then it's a fine instead of a fee. In that case, it's both saving taxes and being tough on crime -- or whatever it is you did.
Of course, the best people to fine are the people who don't fight back. (Of course, if they clog up the court system with frivolous cases, as determined based on pro-government case law, fine them!) That means that corporations who can afford expensive attorneys to sow doubt and earn delay are not the best targets. The average Jo or Joe is who they want to go after. It may be possible to beat a claim that one poisoned the groundwater, but it's damn hard to beat a speeding ticket without a good friend in City Hall.
The Tax Man, in the conservative era, has now become the Fine Man, ready to take away as much as possible -- redoubling fine collection efforts as needed to pay for, among other things, the cost of collecting fines. Drug forfeiture laws can help fund the government at the cost of ruining the lives of often innocent people (at least as "collateral damage." At some point, the fines become so excessive that they literally become ruinous -- but rather than stand up and shake their fists, as we do at taxes, the public puts a lot of effort into making sure that we are not the individuals singled out for fines.
The beast of government will be fed. Military contractors and law enforcement agents will demand it, even if no one else does, and so long as some news reporters will check out to see when the indigent are released from hospitals into Skid Row, we will provide medical care on an expensive "last resort" basis. Our choice, especially at the state level where most budgets require balance, is between taxes and fines and fees. (In the case of the federal government, selling off our children's birthright remains the most favored option.) It is a choice, in other words, between what ought to be a universally enforced system that does not depend on vagaries of enforcement and a system in which everyone simply hopes not to be the zebra in the pack upon which the lion has already set his eyes. It is a choice between everyone being taxed at a level that we can keep from being ruinous and some getting by relatively easily while others are financially destroyed, often for doing nothing different that the person or household or car next to them.
Democracy, Churchill says, is the worst form of government except for all of the others. So are taxes the worst form of government revenue except for all the others. I hate taxes. I hate the paperwork, I hate the rules, I hate the stress. But I hate capricious and ruinous and gratuitous fines from avaricious governments worse -- in part because people will not band together and fight them the way they will high taxes. The regulatory mechanism of preventing government overreach is undermined by a regimen of revenue through fines.
So how will states get along without new taxes? Just fine -- and fine and fine and fine some more. How with individuals living in those states get along? Like zebras always watching for the charging lions and, increasingly, succumbing.