On May 30, 2008, my vehicle registration cost $37.17. On July 13, 2009, my vehicle registration cost $86.48.
That’s about a $49 difference. For me, that’s forty-nine reasons to vote Bill Ritter out of office. State politicians are doing everything they can to squeeze residents at the exact time when many residents are suffering from the recession (my wife took a ten percent pay cut, for example).
And I drive a cheap clunker; most people will find that they have many more reasons to vote against Ritter.
I also had to pay $30 to the City and County of Denver for expired tags, but obviously I won’t hold that against Ritter. (My only satisfaction in the matter was writing “Legalized Theft” in the “For” line of the check.) The reason my tags expired is that the DMV sent my notification form to my old address, so obviously I never got it. (My wife thinks we sent in change of address forms.) I didn’t notice that the month tag was out of date, but the meter maid sure noticed. Because, you know, it’s not enough that I pay taxes to pave Denver’s roads or feed quarters into Denver’s meters.
I should note that the registration fee seems to have covered an extra two months to cover the expiration, but still, that’s a hefty “fee” increase.
Tomorrow I have to take my wife’s car in for the same reason, and then I suspect I’ll have about another hundred reasons to hate Ritter and his Democratic party. [Update: to my pleasant surprise, the tax on our second car actually went down substantially, apparently because the car hit its tenth year.]
Of course, my whole plan of helping to vote Ritter out of office depends upon Republicans running a candidate who’s not even worse than Ritter, which was the problem last time around.
I agree that Gov’t is too good at stealing additional dollars fron citizens simply by arbitrarilly raising taxes, surcharges(taxes) and fees(more taxes). They should be required to make budget cuts just like private folk when revenues go down. That being said, it is still your fault that you let your tags expire. You preach personal responsibility in most matters. This is one of those matters. Maybe later we can talk about whether yearly taxes in the form of registration and licensing fees are a just form of revenue generation or just another form of Gov’t theft.
True enough, because the DMV failed to update our address when we sent in the form, I failed to facilitate the timely theft of our resources. My bad.