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On this day, almost every newspaper in America features an article with a headline that reads something like this:
"White House Faces Opposition to User Fees"
Almost every article begins with the words...
"President Bush hates new taxes, that's for sure."
I disagree.
User-fees are taxes. They are regressive taxes. They are the kind of taxes favored by those who profess the so-called "Ownership Society". The Ownership Society, however, is only code for saying "The Greed Society" --- and today the Greed Society rules.
President Bush may hate those taxes levied upon big corporations and the ultra-rich, but he has no hesitancy sticking it to everyone else. He does so at every opportunity. Today's news story about User-Fees is BIG NEWS because it helps tell a story that needs to be told. It's a story I've been telling for nearly a decade.
In 1997, on the Wild Wilderness website, I published the following words in a document titled "The Future of Public Lands Recreation"
Unnecessary and inappropriate budget cuts to recreation programs were orchestrated by Murkowski and Hansen so as to create an apparent maintenance crisis for federally managed recreation lands and facilities. The rescue of a visibly decaying public system by ARC's private investors and corporate sponsors is the intended outcome. Fee-Demo does not exist to raise needed funding for trail and facility maintenance. It exists to circumvent and eventually repeal the long-standing legal prohibitions upon the charging for recreation on federally managed lands.
What had been an effort lead by Frank Murkowski in the Senate and Jim Hansen in the House, has become a top priority for George W. Bush. Today, the Bush administration is starving all functions of government in order TO CREATE a crisis. The Bush administration is destroying the American economy in order TO ACHIEVE a particular outcome.
In the late 90s, few rose up in opposition to User-Fees. In the mid 00s, will the public rise up, or will they accept their fate passively...
.... or so I wonder??
Scott
Don't you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? ... there would be an American Air-Bottling Association. ... they would let millions die for want of breath, if they could not pay for the air. -- Robert G. Ingersoll, 1896
PS... the many other news stories you've recently read about the President's Budget and his specific proposal to sell National Forest lands are all directly related to the issue I've spoken of here.
--- begin quoted ---
Feb. 11, 2006
White House Faces Opposition to User Fees
By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Bush hates new taxes, that's for sure. But tell
that to airline passengers, higher-income veterans and owners of
freighters using the St. Lawrence Seaway. They are among those hit up
for billions of dollars under his new budget plan.
The spending proposal for the budget year that begins Oct. 1 contains
$3.5 billion in new user fees. Typically branded as new taxes by those
who have to pay them, these fees are intended to hold down the public's
cost for programs such as airline screening, medical care for veterans
and military retirees, food inspection and oversight of commodities
markets.
The fees would swell to $47.2 billion over five years, dunning taxpayers and industry to help pay for government services.
Most if not all of the proposed fees, however, arrived on Capitol Hill dead as a doornail.
The largest single fee would increase the tax paid by airline
passengers for security screenings from $2.50 to $5 for a one-way
nonstop ticket. It would raise $1.6 billion when combined with fees on
cargo carriers.
The Air Transport Association, the major airlines' trade group, opposes
the higher security fees and is confident Congress will reject the
proposal, said the group's president, James May.
The idea behind user fees is that those who benefit from government services should pay for them rather than everyone.
Current fees on passports, national park admissions, patents, stock
transactions, federal court filings and agricultural inspections and
other services are expected to raise $209 billion next year.
"It's not reasonable for all Americans to bear the entire cost of
government activities from which they only receive a partial benefit,"
said Scott Milburn, a spokesman for the White House budget office.
"User fees help match the cost of government programs to those who benefit from them," he said.
Like some other pieces of Bush's 2007 budget, the new fees mostly are proposals rejected in the past.
Airline passengers, in other words, should not start worrying about
paying $10 for every round trip. Congress ignored a comparable proposal
last year after protests from the airline industry.
A similar fate should befall a thrice-rejected plan to boost
prescription drug co-payments for higher-income veterans without
military disabilities and have those veterans pay a new enrollment fee.
Besides generating more than $500 million from the fees, the proposal
would save $251 million from veterans who left the system rather than
pay the fees.
"I think it's dead on arrival," said Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. "We're
in a time of war and we have a huge number of veterans coming back and
casualties. And I don't think at this time we are going to increase the
deductible or co-payment or anything."
Bush also wants to save $249 million from the military health care
costs of early retirees covered by the Pentagon's Tricare health plan
by increasing enrollment fees and deductibles. This is a new proposal;
it, too, is not expected to pass.
Taxpayers would benefit from a new transaction fee on futures and
options markets to finance the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The commission, now supported by general taxes, and has a proposed
budget of $127 million. A similar transaction fee proposal in 2002 died
after the entire Illinois congressional delegation _ including House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. _ signed a letter opposing it.
The Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the
Chicago Board Exchange Options are major employers in the state.
Then there are the more obscure proposals.
A tax of 2 cents per pound on explosives made in or imported into the
United States would pay to regulate the explosives industry. The tax
would raise $120 million next year. An identical fee died last year
amid opposition from large-scale users of explosives such as the mining
industry.
Why does the White House propose dead-on-arrival fees year after year?
With domestic agency budgets so squeezed, fee proposals allow the
administration to boost those budgets without appearing too profligate
_ by assuming the fee revenue gets passed.
"We're not going to just walk away from a good idea just because
someone disagrees with it," said Milburn, the budget office spokesman.
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