Next time you put money into a parking meter, you are cheating your city out of one of its most important taxes. Long, long ago, parking fines were meant for punishing scofflaws, keeping streets safe and providing for a free flow of traffic and turnover in business districts. That was then, this is now. Parking fines are one of the most reliable sources of money for municipal governments to pull into their general funds. This is why you see people get ticketed for parking in bus zones in the middle of the night when there are no busses running. When too many people adhere to parking regulations, municipal governments raise fines. The result is a heinous and not-so-hidden tax that effects business and car drivers alike. One San Francisco City Attorney admitted, “unfortunately, we’ve become structurally dependent on using the pretext of minor infractions to seize revenue from the public. We are increasingly viewing the public as a revenue source, as suckers to be fleeced instead of people to be served.”

If you are tired of being a “fleeced sucker,” Independent Sources recommends that you become vocal on this issue the next time your municipal “representatives” increase their pensions or some other municipal pork. Our more liberal-minded readers should be particularly incensed as this is a rather regressive tax as a $50 parking ticket represents a greater percentage of income for a poor person than a wealthy person, not to mention the fact that lower income people are more likely to be parking on the street than in a garage and thus more likely to be ticketed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 6:23 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.