Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Highway robbery

I had to renew the registration on both of my family's vehicles last month. The 70-odd dollars I had to cough up to allow me to legally drive my old Nissan truck on the state's roads--roads I've already paid for time and again through gas taxes, property tax and income tax--was annoying enough. It was a hefty sum, but tolerable in the same way that a modest payment to a protection racket is "tolerable" to a store keeper who judges it as part of the cost of doing business. But the state demanded three times as much money for my wife's Ford Explorer.

That's just robbery.

Logically, there's no good reason why an SUV should cost more to register than a pickup truck, and certainly there's no reason why it should cost that much. My truck certainly puts more wear and tear on the roads; I've loaded it with ceramic tile, cement backerboard, appliances, a wood-burning stove and construction supplies of all description for my (currently stalled) home-improvement projects.

My wife, on the other hand, rarely carries anything heavier than groceries and our son's car seat. She's just not putting the same kind of strain on the roads as I am.

The SUV has a higher bluebook value than the truck, but the state got it's piece of the action at the time of sale.

The problem is that the state keeps taking a piece of the action.

The culprit for my high registration fees, as Arizona residents already know, is the vehicle license tax. This is a tax on the assessed value of the vehicle that is collected year after year. The vehicle license tax isn't connected to any actual costs imposed by the vehicle on the state's infrastructure. It's nothing more than a shakedown for the simple privilege (according to the state) of being permitted by our masters to own motor vehicles.

In the way that it works, it's not much different than a personal property tax. It doesn't work as a user fee, it doesn't take a piece of a transaction. Instead, it functions as a penalty for being reasonably successful in life and, in doing so, fattens the government's coffers for uses and programs that I mostly oppose.

So, like most taxes, the vehicle license tax hurts me twice: first, by depriving me of money I earned; second, by feeding the maw of the government.

Hmmm. Does anybody know a good source for forged registration stickers?

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