Posted on 07/14/2009 9:32:21 PM PDT by george76
Taxes Vs. Fees: What's The Difference?
The word "fee" has been tossed around a lot lately.
Cities are increasingly passing or considering raising the amount of money residents pay to use recreation centers, libraries, and trash collection services.
Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, said politicians should just be asking the voters for more money if they want it.
Hickenlooper said he was not ruling out the possibility of going to voters and asking for a tax hike but hopes a review of departments and fee increases will help them avoid it.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedenverchannel.com ...
A fee is a tax on people who use taxpayer-funded services.
Hick can't talk his way out of this one, he's met his match. Fees and taxes, cap and trade...and no real recovery for years. Time to go Galt. Forget Babylon. Move out of the cities. The simple life is really quite nice.
Fight to keep TABOR on the local districts.
Ritter froze many of the mils , so tax bills will be extra large next year.
You should have seen the state of Virginia last Friday raising revenue. The state police, unformed tax collectors were working. Haven’t found out which one won the contest yet??
Fees are closer to an accurate price for services than taxes are. Some municipal services are better paid for through fees than through taxes. At least users pay them rather than everyone as through taxes.
They are also not “progressive” being the same for rich and poor. General taxes should be used to fund general services: police, fire protection, judicial institutions, road maintenance etc.
Things are not free.
I’m in Grand County now. My assesment is about $70k high. But we like it here.
And I understand that but when a drivers license goes from 10 bucks to almost fifty that is excessive in my opinion. Or when my water bill went from 10 month to over 50 because of sewer service and they have done nothing to the system that is excessive.
Most fees do not increase as rapidly as those you reference in a short period of time. They prefer to bleed you slowly so as to not arouse opposition.
If the source of funding is shifted from general revenues to a specific revenue source then it can be a dramatic increase but the cost is no longer as hidden. In addition, it is theoretically more efficient to fund this way.
There are not many who pay higher fees associated with an auto than I do but I would rather I pay it than force Aunt Tillie down the road to pay it in hidden taxes. Here in Chicago I pay 4,500 G for property taxes and auto fees totalling $126.
Now that the state legislature is not willing to committ polical suicide by raising income taxes the driver license will likely increase from $15 for 5 yrs.
As to your water/sewer bill no doubt a great portion of the increase is both the result of increased degree of service and EPA mandated changes to the water and sewer systems. These mandates have the tendency to hurt smaller locales particularly since the costs are too large to be easily absorbed by smaller user bases.
Initially EPA funded these improvements through grants so, off course, those communities with access to high powered legal, engineering and consulting services got to the money pie first. So when the program shifted to a loan based program it became harder for those with less expertise in these matters.
The People vote for what they want then they get to pay for it. Ain’t democracy beautiful? Lol.
The tyranny of the majority, if the majority is not paying taxes and getting free handouts to them from the government then why should they vote in fiscal conservative representation?
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