Good - we should not use fees and fines to pay for government services we wish to provide. It creates a situation where gov't agencies begin to exist for their own sake, and to levy such fees/fines to fund themselves, past the point at which they are serving their desired purpose.
If we want to provide "programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs," then we should just do that right out of the general fund. And as long as that cost sits there on the books we can continue to evaluate if we want to grow, shrink, or let it alone.
>It creates a situation where gov't agencies begin to exist for their own sake, and to levy such fees/fines to fund themselves, past the point at which they are serving their desired purpose.
There are so, so many. Even traffic tickets are in this category. If we think it's a good idea to enforce speed laws, we should be willing to pay for that (the officers) directly as part of the police budget paid exclusively from the gov't general budget. If a fine is a good enforcement mechanism, okay - but then just refund that directly to taxpayers. Or use a difference enforcement mechanism like holding the driver by the side of the road for an inconvenient period of time.
I’ve heard it argued that speed limits as a whole could in fact increase fatalities.
I believe it might be true in places with icy/snowy weather. Many people try to reach that magic number on the sign no matter what the conditions are. That means that people driving to the conditions are going far slower than the other people, and as you said - the difference isn’t a good thing, in addition the the fast people being a lot more likely to crash on their own.
I got my drivers license in the golden age of the mid-90s when the US nation-wide 55 MPH limit was repealed. Limits immediately reverted back to whatever the states had on the books.
For Montana (where I lived at the time), there was no posted day time limit; night time it was 55 MPH. While no posted limit, the law stated something to the effect of "must drive reasonable and prudent for conditions". Conditions here is kind of vague, but is pretty all encompassing: road conditions, weather, traffic, your vehicle, your tires, etc. Bright, sunny, summer day in a Porsche with good tires? At 100MPH, you might have gotten pulled over, your tires checked, and then the officer would send you on your way. Blizzard conditions? Driving 45 might get you cited. And the citation had teeth: it was automatic reckless driving, something like a $500 fine and possibly a suspended/revoked license. Previously, the fines were a joke. Something like $5 for up to 20 MPH over the limit, could be paid in cash and didn't go on your record.
Anyways, "reasonable and prudent" was eventually rule unconstitutional because we can't have nice things. So, out it went, and instead it was replaced with a 75 MPH daytime, 65 (I think? maybe it was 55 still) night time limit. It's now 85 day/65 night MPH as of last summer when I last drove through.
But, the tl;dr is: when the posted limit was put in place, highway fatalities increased (quite dramatically from what I recall). No, I don't have any references to cite, it's just my recollection of events from nearly 30 years ago...
We’re a common law jurisdiction, laws are meant to be generalized to allow them to be interpreted and adapted depending on different circumstances, a lot of which are unforeseen at the time of creation of the law.
> it might be true in places with icy/snowy weather. Many people try to reach that magic number on the sign no matter what the conditions are. That means that people driving to the conditions are going far slower than the other people, and as you said - the difference isn’t a good thing, in addition the the fast people being a lot more likely to crash on their own.
For an anecdote:
I went to Dallas to watch the eclipse. I got on I-45 to go home to Houston. Traffic was going great, typically about 90MPH in a 75 zone. There were several cars doing 110+ and zooming between lanes while several others were doing a mere 55. The worst were the people doing 55 in the left lane, being passed by people doing 65 in the right lane. The weather was "fine", just cloudy but a pleasant 85F.
Then, just around Richland, there was a sudden massive downpour and visibility went down to about 100 feet. I could feel my front-wheel-drive wheels losing grip for seconds at a time, even at 75.
It was unusual for my vehicle to lose grip at that speed, but I'm used to driving on slippery gravel roads. I also had expected (planned for) it because I had looked at the weather and knew it would be raining by the time I was home. Gotta keep everyone staggered and plenty of distance between each other. So I let off the gas and coast down in speed until traction was regained.
Even so, we didn't have to go very far on the freeway before everyone was 100% stopped for about 45 minutes. The weather was moving northeast (to a good measure of perpendicularity), so the weather will have hit that whole stretch of freeway about the same time. Someone at the "front" hydroplaned and wrecked with someone else around Streetman where I-45 turns west-ward. By the time I made it to the front, all of the emergency vehicles and both damaged vehicles were nowhere in sight -- so at least there's few rubberneckers.
Driving for the _current_ weather is a bad idea, and not enough people will consider what the weather could be in 30 seconds. That's only considering the weather. The fact that's people doing 55+ and people doing double that is also a massive safety issue on a 2-lane freeway.
Even inside of Dallas and Houston, people are RIDICULOUSLY crazy. If you drive for a few hours at speed limit on the freeways, then you will pass dozens of people doing 20 below in the left lane, and also have other dozens of people scoot between you and other cars with mere single-digit feet between you and them. There will be countless instances of other vehicles coming into your lane and immediately braking to avoid hitting the vehicle that was in front of you but now is in front of them. If you're ever in slow or stopped traffic, there will be a half dozen vehicles skipping past the traffic in emergency lanes.
So, I think speed limits aren't the only thing that need fixing. There needs to be much better safety education and enforcement. There's more to my opinion but I doubt it'd be popular -- consider how empathy, greed, and modern timeliness also contribute to these problems.
traffic tickets must not be a revenue stream in California because they are not efforced. If they were a revenue stream, officers could hang out almost anywhere and catch violators at approximate no less than 1 per minute at nearly every intersection in the city midigated only by the time it takes to stop and register the ticket.
In California, money from traffic fines does not get paid back to law enforcement agencies. In fact, local city government has to pay for traffic enforcement, but gets no revenue from the fines because it all goes to the state.
they are most certainly a revenue stream in California. However there is an interesting law in california...
california vehicle code section 40801
No peace officer or other person shall use a speed trap in arresting, or participating or assisting in the arrest of, any person for any alleged violation of this code nor shall any speed trap be used in securing evidence as to the speed of any vehicle for the purpose of an arrest or prosecution under this code.
That said, I remember a friend fought this once. A motorcycle officer gave him a ticket, and he investigated and found he had given hundreds of tickets from the same location. didn't help.
...and he investigated and found he had given hundreds of tickets from the same location.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but that does not constitute a speed trap. It very well could be that on that section of road there are just a lot of speeding drivers, and hence hundreds of tickets.
One example of a speed trap is if the speed limit takes a sharp drop without warning. For example, rural road with a 60 mph limit, and it drops to 25 mph at the town limits with no "25 mph ahead" signs, and there sits a cop with a radar gun ten meters after the "25 mph" sign.
That is the common definition of speed trap, but it's not the one referred to in the quoted law. The definition used there is limited to 2 things:
1) is a section of highway where cops monitor cars entering and exiting, then calculate an average speed to identify people who were driving over the speed limit. Basically, they need to demonstrate instantaneous speed, not average speed, to write a ticket.
2) is a highway segment that hasn't set its speed limit based on an engineering/traffic survey done in the last 5 years, 10 if nothing nearby has changed.
Sure so show me the math. What percentage of violators need to pay and what are the expensive of getting them to pay, etc. When is it a positive revenue stream.
Also, what laws could be changed to make it so (assuming that's a good thing). Examples: The government takes it directly from your bank account like they do if you don't pay your taxes. Another would be to use a progressive fine system like I've heard they have in some countries so that rich people don't feel like they can just pay the fines and ignore the law.
I'm sure they make money, but far less than 1-1 for each ticket written.
I have the highly controversial opinion that they should use civil asset forfeiture for some traffic violations. If a speed cam catches a car going over 100mph, it's a public danger, regardless of who was operating it. Sue the car, and allow the owner to recover the proceeds from the driver in a separate civil action if they can prove that another person was driving it. Only exception would be if they reported it stolen. Eventually the fine would be paid or the vehicle would be impounded for lapsed registration/insurance.
"The combination of traffic enforcement and Mayor's Court has provided 80% of Linndale's one million dollar annual budget, and underwritten its four full-time and ten part-time police officers.[14]"
If the funds come out of the general fund, but we already can't afford existing government spending to the tune of trillions per year, wouldn't the project be refunded before it even gets started?
The idea of adding more and more spending to an already broken budget is nothing new, but its also extremely confusing to me. Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like?
> Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like?
I think this is the wrong question to ask of the government. At least notionally, when I borrow as a private individual it's to provide some quantifiable benefit in the future. For example if I'm starting a business, I might draft a business plan, conclude that there is money to be made and an opportunity that will dissolve if I try to save, and borrow money to buy equipment to start the business. What we should be asking is "what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years?" I think to the degree that broadband access gives people in rural areas direct access to a market and to knowledge and ideas that they can't access locally, there is a lot of value in the rest of the country paying for this so that they can have the same options that the rest of us have.
> what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years?
That's really key to the question though. The federal government doesn't have to risk any collateral and they aren't held to any repayment schedule. Arguably, once the the debt is created they are actually incentivized to not pay back the debt. The new debt creates new money in the system, removing it later would decrease the money supply and at any meaningful scale would risk deflation.
When governments can create their own money on demand and have no tangible downsides to doing so unless they somehow trigger massive inflation, when does a budget really create much of a barrier to them? When would a government turn down or cancel a program, assuming the money spent isn't going to trigger inflation?
I don't know when, but I can tell you where, Argentina. It's been operating under the premise that their borrowing won't create inflation for the last 100 years.
The recently departed government still claims that their borrowing wasn't the cause of the problem.
Well that is the beauty of economics. The system is so complex that you can claim causation wherever you want and find some data to point to.
I honestly don't get how economics is considered a science or predictive. At the highest level its still largely driven by trying to play psychological games to "nudge" consumers and investors in a certain direction. There's no prediction there, and a science that couldn't, for example, predict that printing $4T would cause inflation isn't really very scientifically accurate with its predictions.
There is no broken budget, the US government isn't a household, it controls its own fiat currency.
Projects which increase economic activity (like rural broadband) can be revenue positive without fees or anything.
Now if the money all gets swallowed up by a huge ISP that doesn't actually give underserved people broadband, then everyone loses and its just corporate sponsorship.
Do you know if there's any way we could really track this?Deficit spending increases the money supply which itself will increase economic activity. I'm not sure how we could know whether an increase in economic activity is due to broadband access or the new cash, especially when the project would likely take years.
I hear this on reddit-like social media all the time but I am disappointed to see it here. This is a low-effort and reductionist take. According to the GAO from 2009 through 2017, private ISPs made about $800 billion in capital investments and federal contributions for rural broadband in that period totalled about $50 billion. What would success look like for that 50 billion? Broadband to everywhere? America is very big and infrastructure is slow and expensive.
That doesn't mean we can't ever do useful work by subsidizing the deployment on infrastructure.
We can and should spend public money to improve broadband infrastructure. I have seen quite a few hugely successful subsidized broadband deployments from PUDs and small municipal power distribution companies in even lightly populated counties. For my money, continuing to subsidize these organizations and empowering them to sell broadband access direct to consumers is a huge value for the money.
I, too, am disappointed that funding the government provides to a for profit entity to provide minimal service to an area is used to pay for an exec's bonus or salary.
Theoretically speaking, it's broadly the same money taken from broadly the same people.
If society decides to take $6/year from every citizen to fund Rural Digital Access, it doesn't matter if they do it by raising broadband prices by 50 cents per month, or by raising income tax rates by 0.01%. They both mean the same thing: You, the average citizen, handing over $6 per year.
The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
> The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
There's also the difference of exactly which people are paying. It's not uniform across everybody, not even across everybody with internet access.
A more extreme example of this same picking of winners and losers is student loan bailouts. The winners are clearly the minority of people who get their loans repaid / forgiven and the losers are all the tax payers getting the tab added to the national debt.
If I was 'michaelt I would love if someone pointed this out for me so that I didn't have to:
'michaelt said (and you quoted):
> The only differences are [one thing] ... and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
Your reply seems to be repeating and slightly expanding on that, but because you started it with this:
> There's also the difference of...
It sets up an expectation that you intended to refute something about the parent comment submitted by 'michaelt. But I can't find anything in the content of your message which disagrees with the parent comment.
Why not allow forgiveness for the only debt in the entire US that legally cannot be discharged through bankruptcy? As a homeowner I can discharge all of my debt in bankruptcy with the consent of a court, but if I spend $20,000 on a degree at the start of my life I must forever be in service of that debt. If you're anti-loan-forgiveness then you need to allow people to discharge these things in bankruptcy.
Student loans used to be eligible for loan forgiveness as well, but we ran into a situation where every new doctor in America was immediately declaring bankruptcy. Unlike a house, the gains from education cannot be repossessed.
> Why not allow forgiveness for the only debt in the entire US that legally cannot be discharged through bankruptcy?
Well for starters they signed on the line that is dotted. Their peers who went to trade school or got a job at McDonald's didn't co-sign their loans.
Plus, the interest rates on debt with no collateral that could be discharged in bankruptcy would be significantly higher. There's nothing special about tuition payments not being dischargeable in bankruptcy, it's student loans specifically. If you pay your tuition or buy books on a credit card then you could declare bankruptcy and it'd be treated like all your other obligations.
> If you're anti-loan-forgiveness then you need to allow people to discharge these things in bankruptcy.
No you don't. Bailing out people for bad decisions like attending overly expensive schools or acquiring useless degrees is a bad idea. It just incentivizes more bad behavior.
King for a day, I'd remove the government out of the student loan business entirely. That'd have a massive drop in college pricing. Let all loans be private and let them be dischargeable in bankruptcy. But changing the rules in an existing system on already made agreements is a bad idea.
> King for a day, I'd remove the government out of the student loan business entirely. That'd have a massive drop in college pricing.
Why do you think it would do that?
I once tried to take a look at college pricing over the last century but wasn't able to find much data. For the few schools where I did find data I found a general trend of college prices going up at something like 2ish times the inflation rate.
That trend didn't show any obvious change when the government got into the student loan business. Prices continued to go up at about the same rate I'd expect based on how they had gone up before. That suggests government loans aren't a major factor in price increases, and so it seems doubtful that taking them away would make much pricing difference.
When I worked at Microsoft around a decade ago they decided to increase paid parental leave dramatically. That's obviously great for employees, though it did come with pushback from those not planning to have kids. The solution was pretty comical, they increased a few other benefits that helped everyone and ignored that this did nothing to solve the concern of new benefits only helping those having kids.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they increased leave and would always support that move. It highlights the problem of picking winners with financial programs. You can't help everyone and any change will have ripple effects.
In the case of student loans, wiping those loans out puts more spending money in those peoples' pockets. Student debt is a problem and tuition costs are crazy IMO, but there's also no avoiding the fact that increasing spending money in lower income brackets will increase prices and competition. Its hard to predict how much the loan forgiveness will help in the long run versus pushing up prices for everyone.
If we want to provide "programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs," then we should just do that right out of the general fund. And as long as that cost sits there on the books we can continue to evaluate if we want to grow, shrink, or let it alone.