Fees for service are a very regressive forms of taxation

Since everyone is talking about fire service, let's use that as an example.

If you live in a mobile home or a mansion, your flat fee is $75 to pay for equipment and the cost of calls. Now, say your mobile home catches on fire. How many trucks and personnel are it going to take to put it out? Now, if the mansion down the road catches fire, how many more trucks and people are they going to need to put it out?

The more traditional structure to pay for such services is property taxes. The larger the home and property, the higher the taxes to protect it. Makes sense since it it a bigger drain on the system.

If you live in a mobile home, chances are your income and property taxes eat up a much greater proportion of you overall income than the millionaire's.

Another example would be waste disposal fees vs. having them included in property taxes.


Bottom line is somebody has to pay for the fire department and other community services. But when we use the model of a service fee, the wealthy are once again getting a nearly free ride.

What Democrat cannot understand regressive taxation?

which is quite fascinating to me since I've been here since the beginning, took part in the first-ever DU meet-up and organized DUers at a war protest in D.C. But, I guess I'm not liberal enough anymore.

How's that? :hi:

See, I'm complicated too. :hi:

and you are certainly right about the regressive taxation.

:pals:

That was sarcasm. Sadly. But like education I've been shocked by the moral scolding this event brought out and how far out of the DU mainstream true liberalism seems to be these days. Hopefully they're just paid astroturfers paid for by Koch money.

But we all know why fees are really cool.

1) They're not taxes. Taxes are bad and are wasted, usage "fees" are collected for a specific purpose.
2) Most importantly, rich folk don't pay more than poor folk. Fairness for the privileged at last!

on four acres, the other a mobile home on two acres.

Rather than pay for annual license renewal on two halves of a double wide PLUS the property tax on the two acre lot, I had them combined into one parcel so that the mobile home is included in the property tax along with the two acre lot.

That property tax total is more than the tax on the site built/4 acres.

If the mobile home goes ablaze, it will be gone in moments, because that's the way mobile homes go.

And that is, if a trailer catches fire it is VERY hard to put it out compared to a mansion. In a fire situation a trailer is essentially a wind tunnel. Look how they're designed. They got a little better after 1976, when national standards were implemented (for instance, they must have drywall now--I've lived in trailers that only had paneling on the walls, and those were disasters waiting to happen. Also, quite a few of them use propane appliances--and propane fires cannot be extinguished. Best estimate is it takes 10 minutes for a trailer to burn down to the frame rails.

Mansions use better materials, they're designed so fire can't propagate as easily...when one of those catches fire, if the fire department gets there before the place flashes over (if flashover--where the air gets so hot everything in the room ignites at once--happens, you're screwed even if the house is brick) they can save it.

So...if the fee-for-service people ever get out of the flat-fee model, God help us, people in trailers will have to pay a LOT more than people in mansions, for the simple fact that it's easier to put out a fire in a mansion.

The wealthy have bigger houses that would presumably require more trucks and people to put it out, but I don't know that one would produce significantly more trash in a year based on income. In fact, if a wealthy person spends more time away from home (vacations, second homes, etc...) wouldn't they be more likely to produce less trash (at least at that residence) in a year than someone who can't afford to travel?

A lot of people love to screw the poor, even here. :(

I'll be damned if I know why.

I expect most DUers are like myself, in opposing the fee-for-fire-service scheme

But I have seen a number of posters here try to explain the political game of chicken being played in Obion County -- and for some reason, perhaps innocent and perhaps not, a number of people seem to have trouble understanding the political game

First, I will explain the context. Then I will explain the political game

CONTEXT. There are eight small towns in Obion county. They all have fire departments, mostly staffed by volunteers and paid for by municipal revenues. These are the only fire departments in the county. They are inadequate as fire protection for the county: even if they answered all county calls, there are people in the county so far from a town that no fire department could respond in time, even if they were all willing to respond for free. The primary responsibility of these fire departments is to the towns which fund them. However, about 2/3 of the county population lives outside town limits, about 3/4 of the county income goes to households outside town limits; and about 85% of county fire calls come from outside of town limits. The towns simply do not have the tax base to support fire service for the entire county, and Tennessee law appears not to provide a mechanism by which the towns can recover expenses for fire calls from outside the towns. Obion county is run by anti-tax Republicans who do not wish to tax anyone for fire service. Obion's county commissioners have refused to fund even a county volunteer fire department, even though the existing municipal fire departments are inadequate to county fire protection needs. Obion's county commissioners have also refused to tax county residents to reimburse the municipal fire departments for fire call service outside of the towns. Obion's county commissioners instead offer, as their "solution" to the county fire service problem, a meaningless authorization for the towns to offer out-of-town residents fire service contracts. This authorization is meaningless because it does not provide any real mechanism for the towns to recover the costs of service if out-of-town county residents refuse to pay service call charges. Therefore, three of the eight municipal fire departments simply do not answer fire calls from outside town. Three other towns offer fire service contracts as "authorized" by the county commissioners but cannot force delinquents to pay fees for the service

POLITICAL GAME. Obion's county commissioners have not addressed Obion county's fire protection needs. Instead, they have found a clever way to bully the small towns in the county into underwriting fire service for the county: they offer a legally unenforceable scheme as a "solution" to the problem, which effectively dumps the costs of county fire protection onto the backs of town residents, and they then seek to create public pressure for this coffer-raiding of the towns, by trying to stir up anger and resentment against the small towns when their ineffective fee-scheme has unsatisfactory results or when there are any other problems. Obion's Republican county commissioners find this situation to be a very cozy pile of shit, in which they are warm and happy, because they get to paint themselves as fiscal conservatives and get to pretend to have offered a solution to problem that they have actually done nothing to solve. The town fire departments, on the other hand, think this is a big stinky pile of shit, because they simply cannot afford to answer all county fire calls for free (although they would prefer to be able to answer all calls) and because they get blamed for every problem, including the predictable failures of the fee-based (which they do not like at all)

Do you get the picture yet?

I encourage you to post it as an OP, there are a great many DUers who have no understanding of what's really going on in that county.

by robber baron Jay Gould.

"You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half."

I haven't heard that any insurance payments were made for the house, municipal equipment damaged in response, or injury for firefighters or residents.

There's your winner.

(airport usage fee for private planes, fees on stock transactions over $1 million, etc.), it would not be regressive. If the fee was for something the working class needs, then it would be regressive.

So they can say that they are not "raising taxes" local commissioners are establishing "fees" for fire and a variety of other things and moving them "off budget" but including them on your tax bill. One problem is that they are not fed income tax deductible like the taxes.

fees for service like cell phone, internet, cable, newspaper?