Stealth Taxes in America

For a while the Republican talking point was that we as a nation needed to have an 'adult conversation' about the economy.  And ignoring for a moment the obvious and inherent patronizing tone to such as expression I do believe they were correct, at least in so far as a conversation needs to be had.  Clearly their idea of slashing taxes for rich people and corporations for a trickle down solution is a load of bollocks and has repeatedly been shown to be disastrous and ineffective, but I digress.

One of the byproducts of the ridiculous Grover Norquist tax pledge and Republican political cock blocking is that many cities are quite simply running out of money.  Some cities have taken drastic steps such as laying off cops or letting whole city areas go dark at night, devoid of street lights.

Then we have the evil traffic camera as another inventive way of raising revenue.  For years now the red light and speeding camera have been around.  And while I am not a fan I can see some logic to it, because motorists who repeatedly run red lights or drive too fast are increasing the risk of accident for themselves and other road users.

But a friend of mine recently got hit with something that was new to me.  It was a camera that took a video of someone who did not come to a perfect stop when performing a legal right on red turn.  And at this point, I have to call bullshit.  A recent study found that a typical motorist would have to drive ONE BILLION miles for a statistical likelihood of being involved in an accident that involved a non-perfect stop during a legal right on red turn.  In other words, this isn't a real issue of public safety, it is simply a money grab or stealth tax for no good reason other than to raise money.

There is a multi point reason why this is all so evil.  For one thing, it is very often a private company who runs these cameras.  So what you have is a legally enforced shakedown of the American people where both the government AND the private company have a vested interest in issuing as many tickets as they possibly can (with no interest in right or wrong, public safety, or making the world a better place.  Simply an interest in catching out as many people as possible to raise money.).  But unlike a tax, a significant portion of the money raised goes to the private company profiteering from this modern day shakedown.

Another reason this is such a bad idea is because it creates mistrust of the government and law enforcement.  Recipients of this bullshit scheme are likely to feel like their privacy has been violated, that they were issued an unjust ticket for a nonsense reason.  In short we are conditioning people to resent authority and believe that the local government is more interested in raising money, no matter how unreasonably, than protecting public safety

Sadly though, this is the byproduct of unending tax cuts and loopholes for the rich, coupled with spending government money on unnecessary nonsense like stealth battle ships, multi billion dollar planes, and a bloated trillion dollar a year military budget.

So getting back to our 'adult conversation' we need to make a choice to have everyone pay their fair share of tax, cut back on out of control spending in areas like defense, or we face the alternative of toll roads, random bullshit tickets, profiteering from raising government revenue, the laying off of police, fire fighters, teachers, and blackouts in our crumbling cities.

It is indeed unfortunate that the Republicans didn't really want a grown up conversation about tax and spending, but merely wanted to push their own agenda of big government handouts to the richest people who are doing just fine but are greedy for more.