To me, this is often the crux of the problem. Governments are always finding new ways to extract money from us, particularly in times like this when tax revenues are falling drastically. While often couched in "safety" terms, most of this stuff is simply about money. Case in point: Virginia set up increased boat registration and fuel taxes under the guise of promoting boating and boating safety and providing much more access to Virginia waters. Along comes tax crunch time and guess what happens. The state rescinds the monies coming in for the boating fund and dumps it into the general fund to pay for the many shortfalls. In addition, the state is shutting down somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the access points they so graciously provided but never really kept up after the initial funding. I betcha it will be a cold day in hades that that rescinded money ever makes it back into the boating fund. More likely, when times are better, they will decide that, oops, the boating fund is short of money, guess we better increase registration fees and fuel taxes to get it back up to speed. And the beat goes on..........ever under the guise of safety and service to the "boating" public. Dave G. <who wants to keep the pols out of his kayaking pocket> Poquoson, Va. At 10:43 AM 4/18/2003 -0700, Shawn Baker wrote: <snip some> >Since a lot of the funding is through boat fuel taxes, maybe we involve >the motorboat lobby, and say, "Hey, this is your money; your fund. We >don't buy boat gas, we don't pay into the fund. They're trying to >register kayaks and canoes so they can spend your money on our safety". > Would this argument work, or will they try to find a way to rewrite >Wallop-Breaux to tax us some other way?! > >Shawn *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Apr 18 2003 - 11:47:55 PDT
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