7 ms·

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

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.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>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. Would you have examples of this in the US?
- adolph 3y ago
  Civil forfeiture is a related example that comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
  - Nifty3929 3y ago
    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.
    - adolph 3y ago
      My first guess is that the penalty box wouldn't pass constitutional muster but that it might be a nice method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_box
    - nox101 3y ago
      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.
      - m463 3y ago
        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.
        mikestew 3y ago
        ...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.
        cptskippy 3y ago
        You just described every highway or interstate near a town in Georgia.
        OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        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.
    - mauvehaus 3y ago
      I'll just leave this here: "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]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linndale,_Ohio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linndale,_Ohio
    - causi 3y ago
      Cities install speed camera before they install red light cameras. That should tell you all you need to know about their intended purpose.
    - m463 3y ago
      > speed laws I think speed laws should be based on engineering/behavior as well. It's possible to artificially set speed limits too low and make normal people into fine-paying-department-funding criminals. There's something called "the 85th percentile" that engineers use to assess whether the speed limit set is too high or too low. (if the speed limit is too different than what normal people drive, the variance in speed will make the road more dangerous) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/85th_percentile_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/85th_percentile_speed
      - Auracle 3y ago
        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.
        hermitdev 3y ago
        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...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
_heimdall 3y ago
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?
- verall 3y ago
  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.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    Like what happened last time, you mean.
    - verall 3y ago
      Yeah, I know, it sucks
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      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.
idontwantthis 3y ago
See USCIS which is raising their already enormous processing fees this month.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

>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. Would you have examples of this in the US?

adolph 3y ago
Civil forfeiture is a related example that comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  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.
  - adolph 3y ago
    My first guess is that the penalty box wouldn't pass constitutional muster but that it might be a nice method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_box
  - nox101 3y ago
    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.
    - m463 3y ago
      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.
      - mikestew 3y ago
        ...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.
        cptskippy 3y ago
        You just described every highway or interstate near a town in Georgia.
        OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        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.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    I'll just leave this here: "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]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linndale,_Ohio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linndale,_Ohio
  - causi 3y ago
    Cities install speed camera before they install red light cameras. That should tell you all you need to know about their intended purpose.
  - m463 3y ago
    > speed laws I think speed laws should be based on engineering/behavior as well. It's possible to artificially set speed limits too low and make normal people into fine-paying-department-funding criminals. There's something called "the 85th percentile" that engineers use to assess whether the speed limit set is too high or too low. (if the speed limit is too different than what normal people drive, the variance in speed will make the road more dangerous) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/85th_percentile_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/85th_percentile_speed
    - Auracle 3y ago
      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.
      - hermitdev 3y ago
        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...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

_heimdall 3y ago

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?

verall 3y ago
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.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Like what happened last time, you mean.
  - verall 3y ago
    Yeah, I know, it sucks
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    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.

idontwantthis 3y ago

See USCIS which is raising their already enormous processing fees this month.