Monster Trucks Get Chicks......White Trash Ones (Government Inc.)

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004)

I am a man. Every man, which hopes to one day become a “burly man”, needs a truck. This is a fact. Without a truck, a man is denied multiple opportunities to lean against the truck to scratch his balls, spit and talk about manly things. Without a truck he can’t go into the wilderness to add “desert pin striping”, change the oil by ripping off the oil pan, unnecessarily tow and haul things, and be able to destroy small hybrid vehicles in collisions without acquiring the smallest scratch on his truck. Men are very passionate about trucks. I have seen guys that have trucks which are easily worth 3-4 times the value of his house. This shows that he has completely dedicated himself to becoming a “burly man”.

My truck

One day at work, we seized a truck’s engine for some thermal studies we were doing. The testing was concluded and my company wanted to unload the truck. I managed to get it running again and said I would give them a couple hundred bucks for it. At the time, I didn’t have a truck and was feeling rather effeminate. After explaining, to my wife, the benefits of having a bent up, rusted, dented, ugly ole farm truck on our property in order to increase the value of our house, I was allowed to make the purchase.

Oh she is glorious. Her name is “Beater”. She is even white like a wife-beater.

Being a responsible U.S. citizen, I thought I would take the truck, proof of cheapo liability insurance, title, and bill of sale down to the DMV express to pay my sales tax, registration and get a license plate. A real nice girl at the DMV took all my info and papers and began the process. As it turns out the last two owners on the title of the vehicle had not paid to register the vehicle within my state. Oh well, at least I am responsible enough to register the vehicle, right? That is where the trouble began.

I actually dislike only one politician in the world. I think Jimmy Carter was a huge moron, but I don’t dislike him. The only politician I dislike is my current state governor, Mr. Bill Richardson. He is the only politician that has managed to screw me, personally, on a couple of occasions. Here is how he screwed me this time…..

Part 1
So Mr. Richardson passed some legislation, this last year, saying that if you buy a vehicle and the previous owner/s did not pay registration on the vehicle, then the current owner gets to pay all those past fines and registration bills. I was supposed to cover the two previous owners for all the money they never paid up for all those years. Add $XX.XX plus the cost of registration for myself.

Part 2
So Mr. Richardson passed some more legislation, this last year, saying that you are no longer taxed 3% of the bill of sale price on the vehicle, but you are now taxed 3% on the blue book value of the vehicle. If you feel that your actual vehicle value does not meet the blue book value, then you have to appeal to the state regarding the value of the vehicle which may or may not be changed. The girl at the DMV then actually handed me a document which showed the value of a private sale was around $2,000 and the blue book value of the vehicle was a little over $8,000. There is no way in #$*@ the truck is even worth $2,000 much less $8,000. Add $XX.XX to the previous total.

The amount of dinero I was supposed to pay for tax, registration, and license was more than I even paid for the truck. I thought I was doing the right thing by even coming in to register and title the vehicle. I was never going to drive it except to landscape my yard, after that it could have died and I could care less. For knowing I would never drive the vehicle, the ONLY reason I came to the DMV was to do the right thing. Little did I know, my state government was planning on making a profit off me. The girl behind the counter, a DMV employee, laughed at how much money I was supposed to pay and said, “I wouldn’t even pay that.” We had a nice laugh about how ridiculous it was and I collected my documents and headed out the door without donating a penny to my state.

Now I could make many points about bad government intervention from this example but my real point is this: Since when did the Government stop trying to be a non-profit organization and turn into another business?

As far as I can tell, the only reason we title and register vehicles is because the government wants to track the ownership of a valuable possession to collect some taxes on it. As we all know, if large sums of money are moved in any fashion, the government wants in on it. Each state wants their 2-7% of the value of the vehicle to make some money and cover the cost of making a paper trail to track ownership. The only thing they are really doing is making a paper trail. It takes about 5 minutes to enter some information into a computer and it costs you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, to accomplish that. This is the most efficient business model ever created. All businesses need to figure out how to accomplish this. Even after all that, they want $50 each year to re-register the vehicle. We can use this knowledge to create a mathematical formula to understand a simple government expense and billing process.

Government Money Making Scheme Part 1
+ 3% of Inflated Blue Book Value of the car
+ Registration
+ Past registration and fees
+ Title processing
+ License Plate
Total One time Registration Bill: 148.7% of the value of the vehicle

Government Money Making Scheme Part 2
+1 piece of paper with printed ink characters
+1 pre-addressed envelope
+1 stamp to mail paper and envelope
+35 seconds for MVD worker to open envelope and check a box somewhere indicating payment
Total Yearly Registration Bill: $50 billed to car owner +cost of stamp

Does anyone know if I can buy stock in the Government? With a business model like that they have to do very well and I want in.

Let’s reiterate the main point of this story. The only reason the government does all of this is just to track ownership, yet they have turned it into a money making scheme and they get away with it because we are required by law to comply with this process.

So now I have added one more unregistered, uninsured vehicle to the road. Now that I think about it, that actually puts me right into the demographic of people that voted for Mr. Bill Richardson anyway. If we know one thing about politicians, they would never ever negatively affect their contingency. I am no longer a tax paying, vehicle registering, insurance complying person…….I am a New Mexican.

Government, Inc.
As I ponder upon why the government applies taxes to us, I realize something is occurring right under our noses. (For a funny little poem on taxes see the following link) The tax system is entirely too complex to evaluate, but at least I can evaluate what taxes are needed for:
Infrastructure –Roads, parks, water, sewage, courthouses, dams, libraries, etc.
Safety systems – Fire department, FBI, police, soil and water conservation, maybe even FEMA?
Social support – mentally and physically infirm, elderly, children
Defense - Army, Navy, coastguard, CIA, Border Patrol, etc.
Laws – Somebody has to spend some time to figure out the rules we will live by

Now you can imagine lots of little ants running around trying to support these five points. Those ants take time, talents, effort, money and materials to do what they do; it is a very big system to support 306 million people. So big in fact that one might conclude we should also add an item #6, then #7, then #8. See, we vote in the kind of people that will change things to be the way we want it and they can control all these issues. Power to the people! Maybe we could get everything run by the government. Anything that seems unfair, irrational, unjust, or complex can be transferred to our huge government to begin controlling that system. They may have to tax us a little more, but it has to be a good change, right?

Currently the government is just about intervening on everything we ever do, and they tax us for that. We don’t even attempt to fix our own problems because there is either already a government program for this problem or one is in the pipeline shortly to be added. The government is becoming a big business because we don’t produce our own business anymore.

Every year the government will tax us more and more and more because of more and more government intervention. It is a simple formula: the reason they tax us more is because they are intervening more. I would like to introduce the word “socialism.” Any historian or economist will tell you that today our government is tending towards socialism rather than towards a pure capitalistic based democracy. Am I the only one that doesn’t like that idea?!

So what do we do to fix it? The problem is the government has become so big and so integrated that I don’t know how to reverse its direction. Other than pulling the plug, AKA anarchy, how do you stop it or put it in reverse? My brother told me something awhile back that made me think. He said,
“I was talking some of these ideas up with a good friend here in Monterey, he’s very smart and politically active, and his response really broke my heart. Essentially, he said, “I used to be Libertarian, but I stopped because I realized what would happen to America if we cut a lot of the government fat. The families of our society are too dependent on redistribution of money – society would go through a time of dysfunction.” What’s worse is that, to an extent, he is right. American society is nigh hopelessly dependent on the way the government spreads money.”

I am not proposing anarchy, by any means, but I am all ears for how to reverse the government’s direction? At this point all I can say is, “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” Will Rogers (1879-1935)