Re: [Paddlewise] Kayak Registration

On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 11:13:40AM -0500, Michael Lampman wrote:
> Unlike the majority of the voting public, I believe that we must all 
> pay a fair share of taxes at all levels.  

And there is a major part of the problem.  Let me deal with that
one and then enumerate a few others:

It is far more expedient for politicians to assess "user fees" on
paddlers -- or on any other group, for that matter (preferably one
that doesn't carry a lot of political clout) than it is to have
the integrity and honesty to stand up and say:

	"We need to raise taxes.  We need to pay for schools and roads
	and parks and police and building inspectors and snow removal
	and a kazillion other things, and we don't have enough money...
	so we need to raise taxes."

User fees are a cop-out.  They're an implicit admission that there
isn't enough money in the general fund to pay for these things...and
that the politicians enacting them are doing so because they don't
have the guts to tell us the truth.


Which brings me to some of the other problems:

- Just as they don't have the guts to tell the truth, *we* the public,
by and large, don't have the guts to listen to it.  We prefer to be told
"no tax hikes" at the same time there is a crying need for EXACTLY that.
And we will vote for people who tell us this -- even though we know
they're flat-out lying -- instead of voting for people who tell us the
truth and raise our taxes.  (I'm gonna skip the whole arguement over
tax system design because this is wandering far enough as it is.)

- Thinking that user fees will give those paying them a voice is nice.
Maybe it will.  *Maybe*.  But I think it's far more likely that all those
voices will be drowned out by the first lobbyist with $200K to drop on
a state official or $500K to drop on a national one shows up.  A petition
from a thousand paddlers is a whisper; a free cruise weekend from a jet
ski manufacturer is a shout.

- The collection of user/registration fees is inefficient and wasteful:
collecting $2 at the river, and $4 at a state park, and $5 at a bike
trail, costs a LOT more than collecting $11 at tax time.

- User/registration fees are uneven.  Not everyone has to pay a
user/registration fee for everything or in all places or all the time
or anything else.  There's really no way around this -- other than not
to have them at all.

- User/registration fees are also uneven in other ways.  Example:
Someone who has 4 kayaks and 2 canoes is not necessarily going to make
any more use (in terms of user-days) of a state's waterways than
someone with 1 kayak.  Yet, if they're compelled to register them all,
they'll pay 6 times as much.

- User/registration fees (as has already been observed) don't always go
back into the resources that ostensibly justify their existence.  And
even if they do, they make a *very* convenient target for raiding at
budget-crunch time, doubly so if the raiding can be done quietly.

- User/registration fees have an uneven impact on the poor.  Those of us
here may be fortunate enough to find $3 here or $8 here merely annoying,
but for others, it's a barrier.  And good *grief*, aren't we wealthy enough
as a society to to _at least_ provide unfettered access to natural areas/
outdoor recreation to *everyone*, even the people who can't afford it?
Sheesh, they've got so little, I can't really see begrudging them the
chance to just take a walk in the woods or a float down the river, even
if that means we're paying a tiny increment more.


The bottom line is that acquiring, preserving, maintaining, patrolling,
etc., natural resources takes money, and as far as "things we spend public
money" on go, it seems _to me_ to be a pretty sensible one.  So I don't
mind paying my share (whatever that works out to be) and I don't even
mind paying a little extra to cover the folks who aren't up to covering
their own.  But let's do it and get it over with: figure out what it costs,
put it in the national/state/local general bduget, along with everything
else, and then tax accordingly to make it work.  And let's stop piddling
around with a kazillion user fees/registration fees.

---Rsk
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