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Today, fair readers (hi you two!) I want to play “Let’s Pretend.” It’ll be fun, promise.

Let’s pretend that we all live in the same state: Amerachusetts. Very imaginative name, I know. Came up with it out of the blue, what can I say? And while living in Amerachusetts, I decide to get married, thus all of you need to pay the government $5. Please cough it up. *holds out hand to audience*

What? You don’t want to pay the government $5 because I’m getting married? What kind of friends are you guys anyway? Well, what about when I go get my new driver’s license with my new name on it? I’ll need everyone to hand over $10 at that point, thanks.

Come again? You don’t want to pay $10 for me to get a driver’s license? What about a hunting license and fishing license for our honeymoon? My fiance is a real outdoorsman. No on that too? Sheesh! Talk about unsupportive people!

Why don’t you guys want to pay for me to get my licenses and paperwork from the government? Because I want the item, not you, so it’s my responsibility to pay for it?

Not shockingly, this is exactly how Mitt Romney felt about fees when he became governor of Massachusetts. The fees for various services such as marriage licenses, gun registration, car registration, etc, had not been raised for years, some of them for decades. Are you being paid the same amount now that you were two decades ago? Then why expect that the fees you pay at the courthouse remain the same? The price of gas has gone through the roof, groceries are much higher, and this is only in comparison to last year! When you talk about differences in prices from ten or even twenty years ago, you’ll start to see that the same fee structure cannot possibly still cover everything.

Because if it costs the state government $43 to issue a new driver’s license, and they are only charging each person $32, where does the extra $11 come from? There is no magic hat that the government can pull that $11 out of. They have to get it somewhere. And that somewhere is from general taxes. Property taxes, sales taxes - all of these have to be raised to cover the shortage that the overly low fees have left behind.

And so when the fees don’t cover the cost of providing the service, the general public is left holding the bag. The cute little old couple down the street who got married 50 years ago is still paying for new wedding licenses every time they go to the grocery store to buy milk. Now tell me how that’s fair.

Some people wonder how raising taxes is different from raising fees. It’s all the same, right? WRONG! There is a world of difference between the two. Here it is, in a nutshell:

The fees only affect the people who want to use the service. Taxes affect everyone.

You can choose if you want to pay the fee by deciding if you want to use the service. If you don’t pay your taxes, on the other hand, you’ll end up in jail. Not exactly a choice.

So if a governor kept the cost of a fee equal to the cost of providing the service, then he would also be able to keep taxes down, because he wouldn’t be trying to cover any deficit. This means money is paid by the people who should be paying it, and lower taxes for everyone else.

This only works in theory, however, because a governor could raise fees to cover the cost of providing a service, and then still raise taxes. Luckily for Massachusettsians, Mitt Romney did not fall into that trap. He raised fees $260 million to cover the cost of services, and didn’t raise taxes at all.

Which is just the way it ought to be.

Hava

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