Georgia Birthday Card

    This week mine came in the mail.  The envelop bore a message demanding that you open it immediately because it’s government business.   For several years Georgia has used the owner’s birthdate for the car tag renewal deadline.  They send you a notice a few weeks ahead of your birthday to provide time to get an emissions inspection and any necessary repairs.

    Did I mention that there is a tax in there too?  It’s based on their estimate of the value of the car.  They used to use a straight line depreciation model but now use a value estimate.  This means that if you drive a five year old Toyota or Honda, you will be paying more tax than if you had a car which lost value at a higher rate. 

But writing my checks this morning, I was thinking about how many different payments and deadlines there are imposed on us by various governments.  And they are just to get money for their operations.  But they are generally going from the same pockets to the same places.  In fact, I have to write checks to the exact same tax commissioner at different times of the year for property tax on my house and a several hundred dollar annual fee for “solid waste” services.

This is a system designed for the benefit of government (them) instead of the taxpayers or customers (us).  We would be far better off if we could force them to use a smaller number of taxes that were easy to calculate so we could keep up with what we pay.  But for them it is better to nip us for a little here and a little there so it is harder to fight off.  And it is easier for them to get more money.  Of course with different tax systems there is more overhead in duplicate collections processes but that is a problem for us not them since we have to pay for that too.

I was thinking about this today reading an item about a new tax on stock trades proposed by labor unions.  The beauty is that it will be a small amount applied to a huge number of transactions and would draw in a lot of money.  And the thing that they and governments would like is that it would be hard to see.  But it would still be coming out of our pockets.

Every time any new tax is proposed, we need to remember that if we are among those who pay taxes, it will be us paying it.  The idea of getting services from the government for free is a fallacy.  All of this money comes from somewhere and it is inevitably the pockets of the productive part of society who is already paying.