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I am keeping a spreadsheet in my phone to try and track every tax or expense that government imposes on me during this year:
- Paycheck withholding amounts
- Sales taxes
- Occupancy taxes / transient taxes / etc. on hotel bills
- Gas taxes
- DMV fees – and all their variations: Smog checks, time to get a smog check, etc.
- Time spent waiting in line at government offices
- Time spent on compliance
- Bridge tolls
- Taxes on utility bills and phone bills
- Fees for permits and regulations
- Time spent in a DUI checkpoint
- Airport taxes
I want to make a list that is as comprehensive as possible of moneys, and lost productivity, due to government regulations. Perhaps others can suggest more categories.
I will attempt to quantify when I receive an actual service in return for some fee, for example a bridge crossing, or borrowing a library book. I expect such list to be relatively short.
On 1/4/11 3:59 PM, "Omar" wrote:
 | Helpful info on the exemptions.
But to the 2nd part of your email – are you also going to attempt to quantify the value of most public goods, such as schools/teachers for your family, roads for you to drive on, police and firemen to keep you safe (not to mention Homeland Security and the military), street lights, garbage pick-up, USPS, street cleaning, etc etc…? Trying to attach a concrete one-to-one value kinda leaves out many of the services the government provides, don’t you think? |
Roads are a good example of a value received, and I will track the number of miles I drive this year.
Firemen do a wonderful service to keep neighborhoods safer. I believe they are funded by property taxes, and I don’t own any property taxable property. My landlord does, but I haven’t decided if I will try to track a tax like that. If I did, I would also have to track corporate taxes as a portion of the price of items I buy at retail.
USPS probably doesn’t qualify with the others, since it is potentially supported by the fees paid by people sending the mail. However, if you go to the USPS to mail a package, the true cost is not the postage, it is also the time that you spend standing in line, which seems to be a much longer line than at private shipping companies. That needs to be tracked relative to the service received, which is the delivery of a package. Eventhough USPS media mail might seem cheap, if you wait much longer at the post office than at Fedex, it might be cheaper to use Fedex.
I pay for tuition at a private school to provide home schooling assistance, so public schools and teachers benefit to my family is very remote. Some would say that it is worthwhile to have public schools educating the children to work better jobs to pay into social security when the current generation retires. But then we get into the whole issue of $10K spent per student, very little of which supposedly reaches the local classroom, and producing students who do less well, on average, than my child who is home schooled, one wonders if we are getting the benefit we are paying for. Yes the cost to home school is greater than the taxes I personally pay to support local schools I don’t directly benefit from, and in addition to paying tuition, my wife and I spend time doing the tutoring that we could spend working more hours. Does the fact that we sacrifice our income to provide this service for ourselves harm society because if we took the public benefit, we might have more time to work, and thus pay more taxes to support the common good?
Theoretically the police keep us safer, but they in general don’t prevent crime as much as we might hope. And sometimes they don’t do that great of a job after the crime either. I had a car stolen year before last. When the highway patrol found it abandoned a few months later, rather than giving me a chance to go pick it up, they immediately gave it to a tow yard who charged me $350 for the surrender of the vehicle (and later threatened to charge me an additional $3K in storage fees before admitting the later notice was in error). The police did absolutely nothing to identify the thief, and an officer told me even if they found someone in the car, if they weren’t driving, they wouldn’t be charged with theft, they could have just been “checking out” the car. There was no interest in dusting for finger prints. The officer told me if they put every non-violent crime in the Oakland area on the court calendar for active prosecution, there would not be another open court date in Oakland for the next 7 years. I showed the officer a bunch of parking tickets on the dashboard that the thief ran up, the officer said he would look at the locations as a clue, but I’ve never heard back. Here’s the fascinating thing: Every one of those tickets was issued by a meter maid with a small handheld computer that knew who the parking scofflaws were. But it had no information about stolen vehicles. Why couldn’t it have been loaded with those plate numbers too? City employees had at least three contacts with my stolen vehicle before it was abandoned, and they did not do anything to recover my vehicle. In fact, the city of Oakland is still chasing me for those parking tickets via a collection agency, despite my several times sending proof in the form of police reports about the car being stolen. How have the police, the meter maids, or the parking ticket courts, delivered anything other than a service of incompentence to me? Where is the value?
I even contacted the highway patrol, concerned that their chosen tow operator, after I had paid all fees they wanted to assess, was sending false lien notices to the State, and threatening me with demand letters for extra storage. I was smart enough not to pay the fees, but would someone who english was a second language, or an elder person, been fooled into thinking they owed extra fees? Would they have sent in more money? It was the kind of letter that if you saw it, you would think someone was stupid if they ignored it. There was no ignore option to it. Because I was smart enough not to send any extra money, I have no damages, other than my aggravation. The tow yard refused to give me any written “please ignore our demand notice” dated after the false notice they sent me. I informed the highway patrol of this scam and my concerns, I even found the officer in charge of approving the tow company contracts, but they had no interest to take any kind of official report. This is service?
The military and homeland security are reasonable functions of the federal government. Hard to quantify whether all their operations are really contributing to our personal safety here in the U.S.. But I am very thankful for our military, and am not anti-military. I don’t believe in the “what if the military had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” idea.
I want to research how street lights are paid for.
Garbage pickup is a fee that I pay to a private company. But it could be quasi government. Water is similar. I should research them.
I’ve never seen street cleaning in my area, but in New Mexico, last year they picked up 24,000 tons of trash from their roads, according to a billboard. Should I count a portion of that effort to my benefit, as I was recently driving across New Mexico? I saw plenty of tumble trash in addition to tumble weeds, but perhaps the drive was much less eventful and safer due to the lack of those extra tons of garbage.
According to a newspaper article in a town I was passing through, the occupancy tax in some cities goes to the state, and then is sent back to the city to if the city uses those moneys to promote tourism. As someone who was just driving through, and decided I am too tired to drive any farther, does that tax, and the tourism promotion of that city, really benefit me in any way? Probably not, I would have done just as well to stay at a hotel outside the city limit. I wonder about the efficiency of the city giving their money to the state to have it given back to the city.
I want to track what I am paying in a fairly direct way, and what I am getting in a fairly direct way.
When considering the functions government at various levels, we need to consider are those involvements appropriate functions of those levels according to their constitutions.
Would we think more about the benefits of government if the costs were more obvious?
My goal is to first try to accurately measure what government and its functions seems to be costing me and my family.
Anyhow, thanks very much for your thoughts.
- Garnet
| Omar wrote back... Wow, thanks for the incredibly detailed response. Though I would guess that we are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, your social experiment is fascinating and I’d be interested to hear what you find. |