1/21/2014

Tickets

To park overnight on the street outside this apartment, one must have a permit receipt in their car, which they acquire at a clunky terminal outside the Pasadena fire station or police station and which costs $3 per night.

On Sunday night I forgot the thing and received a ticket for $46.00 which reminds me once again that this country has a completely awful relationship with government revenue.

Obviously the act of printing out a piece of paper and placing it on my car did not cost the city $46. I am essentially being charged for the fact that an employee exists to do this job at all, just like drivers who venture onto the road with expired car registrations and get tickets are in essence paying for the entire existence of a police force and DMV.

Tickets and fees are used to pay for basic public infrastructure. Because of this country's aversion toward personal taxes, especially as expressed in local voting, no city or state has the money they require to maintain that infrastructure through "honest," or more simply "direct beneficiary to provider" revenue. They make up for it in excessively feeing nuisance-cost-causers.

The most explicit implementation of this scam is the sheriff's offices on highways that target drivers passing between other towns, and ticket completely exorbitant amounts. Here the municipality which the sheriff serves is acquiring revenue from the citizens of other municipalities.

But more common is police unleashing these excessive fees on citizens of their own jurisdiction. The revenue transfer here is between "unethical," cost-causing offenders, who are disrupting efficient road operation for example by disregarding a check on excessive non-residential parking or car-storage on a residential street, to non-offenders who require available spots for their cars.

Maybe on balance drivers from other Los Angeles cities, staying overnight at friend's houses for parties or sex, are paying these Pasadena fines than Pasadena residents, but there's no doubt that Pasadena residents are off paying the same fines in other neighborhoods and cities in turn.

The money is not free just because it comes from a "bad" driver. And this distribution of cost burden is not ideal. Violations like car registration and inspection fall heavier on low-income drivers who have less time and money to keep their cars compliant with these types of laws, but ticketing only adds deprives them further of time and money, making it ever less likely that the car standards the fees are meant to enforce will be upheld. There's no reason not to simply pay for traffic infrastructure with taxes.

It's sensible to design fees to punish cost-causing behavior - tickets should be undesirable. But for most situations $20 would achieve this. What is not sensible is asking offenders to pay for the infrastructure that monitors them. That ignores the fact that the infrastructure provides a constant monetary value to the non-offending beneficiaries. Residents seeking parking for their vehicles outside their homes value that parking. The parking officer provides this value. The parking officer is not a cost inflicted on non-offenders by offenders.


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