MauledAgain

From the outset of this blog, I have made it a point to work Halloween into MauledAgain, usually looking for the silly or goofy but occasionally taking a more serious approach. The posts began with Taxing "Snack" or "Junk" Food (2004), and have continued through Halloween and Tax: Scared Yet? (2005), Happy Halloween: Chocolate Math and Tax Arithmetic (2006), Tricky Treating: Teaching Tax Trumps Tasty Tidbit Transfers (2007), Halloween Brings Out the Lunacy (2007), A Truly Frightening Halloween Candy Bar (2008), Unmasking the Deductibility of Halloween Costumes (2009), Happy Halloween: Revenue Department Scares Kids Into Abandoning Pumpkin Sales (2010), The Scary Part of Halloween Costume Sales Taxation (2011), Halloween Takes on a New Meaning and It Isn’t Happy (2012), Some Scary Halloween Thoughts (2013), The Inequality of Halloween? (2014), When Candy Isn’t Candy (2015), Beyond Scary: Tax-Based Halloween Costumes (2016), Another Halloween Treat? I Think Not (2017), If Halloween Candy Isn’t Food, Is it Medicine? (2018), The Halloween Parent Tax: Seriously? (2019), Halloween Chocolate Construction Project (2020), The Tax Consequences of Halloween Candy Buy Back Programs (2021), Two Not Very Amusing, But Scary, Halloween Tax Challenges (2022), and Does This Halloween Practice Foretell a Scary Future? (2023)

In 2019, in The Halloween Parent Tax: Seriously?, and last year, in Does This Halloween Practice Foretell a Scary Future?, I shared my thoughts about the Halloween “parent tax,” which also goes by the name of “dad tax.” I dislike the idea of parents summarily taking candy from their children. I prefer that parents, throughout the year, teach and encourage their children to share, so that when they return from collecting candy they offer some to their parents without being prompted. Children who are taught to share grow up to be different sorts of adults than children who are ordered to do things without explanation or efforts to deepen understanding so that behavior reflects inner conscience. Too many children raised in authoritarian environments grow up lacking an ability to think critically and end up wanting to live in an authoritarian world.

Sadly, a quick google search reveals that the practice of imposing a parent tax on children not only continues but is being practiced by increasing numbers of parents. That is sad. There even is a parent tax form. And it now has reached the point where the computation of the tax now generated disagreement. As noted in this parent tax advocacy, some parents take a set amount of candy no matter how much the child collects and other parents take percentage, with some taking as much as 50 percent and others advocating percentages such as 33 or 20 percent. If this trend continues, the parent tax will become increasingly complicated, not unlike actual taxes. That’s yet another reason to set aside imposition in favor of teaching children to share.

It is worth repeating what I noted in The Halloween Parent Tax: Seriously?:

So although some people think Halloween presents an opportunity to teach children that “the government” is going to “take some of what you earn,” I think it provides an even better opportunity to teach children the concepts of generosity, empathy, and sharing. Those character traits are disappearing too rapidly among certain segments of society.

Now, five years later, in a world increasing afflicted by self-centeredness, I wonder what lessons are actually being learned by children who observe their parents taking substantial portions of their candy, not through sharing but by fiat. Thirty years from now, how will today’s children raised under those circumstances treat their children? How will they treat other people? Will generosity, empathy, and sharing be part of their worldview? The reality could turn out to be scarier than Halloween.

Reader Morris has directed my attention to the solution enacted by the City of Rock Island to deal with the fact its local gas tax collections have been falling for the same reason gas tax revenues have been falling at the national and state level. According to this article, Rock Island is replacing its local gas tax with a new “street improvement utility fee” that will cover the cost of maintaining roads, sidewalks, parking lots, traffic signals, and street lighting. The fee will raise roughly four times what the gas tax generated.

For me, someone who thinks user fees should be tied to what is being used, the snag is how the utility fee is computed. According to the article, the fee is based on the size of properties, making it, in effect, a property tax. The fees range from $7 per month for parcels less than 6,000 square feet to $30 per month for parcels larger than an acre. Putting aside the equity of having only four categories of property size, causing, for example, the fee to be the same for a ten-acre property as it is for a one-acre property, the bigger problem is that there is an inadequate connection between property ownership and road maintenance.

The Rock Island street improvement utility fee will be imposed in the same amount on two property owners who own identical-sized properties, one of whom drives a vehicle and the other of whom does not. Granted, the non-driving property owner benefits from the use of roads by vehicles making deliveries or rendering services to the property owner, but that usage is disproportionately less than the usage by the driving property owner. Worse, people who do not own properties but live in Rock Island pay nothing. Transients who travel through Rock Island pay nothing. At least with the gas tax, non-property-owners and transients did at times purchase gas in the city and thus help pay for maintenance of the roads they were using.

Readers of MauledAgain know what I offer as the solution. It’s the mileage-based road fee. That fee reflects the usage of a road by a vehicle, taking into account its weight and other factors. Having a city or town administer that fee at the local level could be challenging, but there is a simple implementation. The fee, imposed at the state level, could be shared among localities that are responsible for maintenance of local roads, though a state might decide to take over maintenance of all roads in the state and benefit from the economies of scale that would exist. The point is that funding road maintenance costs with a fee imposed on property owners is like funding road maintenance costs by imposing a fee on boat owners.

For those not familiar with the mileage-based road fee, I have written about it on numerous occasions, in posts such as It is an implantation of the mileage-based road fee that I have supported for many years. I’ve also written about the fee many times, in posts such as Tax Meets Technology on the Road, Mileage-Based Road Fees, Again, Mileage-Based Road Fees, Yet Again, Change, Tax, Mileage-Based Road Fees, and Secrecy, Pennsylvania State Gasoline Tax Increase: The Last Hurrah?, Making Progress with Mileage-Based Road Fees, Mileage-Based Road Fees Gain More Traction, Looking More Closely at Mileage-Based Road Fees, The Mileage-Based Road Fee Lives On, Is the Mileage-Based Road Fee So Terrible?, Defending the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Liquid Fuels Tax Increases on the Table, Searching For What Already Has Been Found, Tax Style, Highways Are Not Free, Mileage-Based Road Fees: Privatization and Privacy, Is the Mileage-Based Road Fee a Threat to Privacy?, So Who Should Pay for Roads?, Between Theory and Reality is the (Tax) Test, Mileage-Based Road Fee Inching Ahead, Rebutting Arguments Against Mileage-Based Road Fees, On the Mileage-Based Road Fee Highway: Young at (Tax) Heart?, To Test The Mileage-Based Road Fee, There Needs to Be a Test, What Sort of Tax or Fee Will Hawaii Use to Fix Its Highways?, And Now It’s California Facing the Road Funding Tax Issues, If Users Don’t Pay, Who Should?, Taking Responsibility for Funding Highways, Should Tax Increases Reflect Populist Sentiment?, When It Comes to the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Try It, You’ll Like It, Mileage-Based Road Fees: A Positive Trend?, Understanding the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Tax Opposition: A Costly Road to Follow, Progress on the Mileage-Based Road Fee Front?, Mileage-Based Road Fee Enters Illinois Gubernatorial Campaign, Is a User-Fee-Based System Incompatible With Progressive Income Taxation?. Will Private Ownership of Public Necessities Work?, Revenue Problems With A User Fee Solution Crying for Attention, Plans for Mileage-Based Road Fees Continue to Grow, Getting Technical With the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Once Again, Rebutting Arguments Against Mileage-Based Road Fees, Getting to the Mileage-Based Road Fee in Tiny Steps, Proposal for a Tyre Tax to Replace Fuel Taxes Needs to be Deflated, A Much Bigger Forward-Moving Step for the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Another Example of a Problem That the Mileage-Based Road Fee Can Solve, Some Observations on Recent Articles Addressing the Mileage-Based Road Fee, Mileage-Based Road Fee Meets Interstate Travel, If Not a Gasoline Tax, and Not a Mileage-Based Road Fee, Then What?>, Try It, You Might Like It (The Mileage-Based Road Fee, That Is) , The Mileage-Based Road Fee Is Superior to This Proposed “Commercial Activity Surcharge”, The Mileage-Based Road Fee Is Also Superior to This Proposed “Package Tax” or “Package Fee”, Why Delay A Mileage-Based Road Fee Until Existing Fuel Tax Amounts Are Posted at Fuel Pumps?, Using General Funds to Finance Transportation Infrastructure Not a Viable Solution, In Praise of the Mileage-Base Road Fee, What Appears to Be Criticism of the Mileage-Based Road Fee Isn’t, Though It Is a Criticism of How Congress Functions, Ignorance and Propaganda, A New Twist to the Mileage-Based Road Fee, The Mileage-Based Road Fee: Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Than the Alternatives, Some Updates on the Mileage-Based Road Fee, How to Pay for Street Reconstruction, Stop the "Stop EV Freeloading Act" Because The Mileage-Based Road Fee Is a Much Better Way to Go, Why Is Road Repair and Maintenance Funding So Difficult for Public Officials to Figure Out?, Should (Will) Implementing the Mileage-Based Road Fee Cause Privatization of Highway Infrastructure?, The Freedom Caucus Doesn’t Understand that the Mileage-Based Road Fee is “PRO-Freedom,” Not the Opposite, and A Mileage-Based Road Fee by Any Other Name?.

Recently, reader Morris alerted me to a post on the AWS Machine Learning Blog. According to the post, “The tax code includes 15,000+ federal tax forms and state tax forms for individual and business tax filers in the U.S.” Reader Morris commented, “I have read parts of the Internal Revenue Code and various state tax codes and I have never seen a federal or state form in these publications.” I replied, “And you are correct, forms are not in the code or regulations.”

I spared Reader Morris a thorough critique of the sentence. It’s not only the absurd claim that forms are found in “the tax code.” It’s also the use of the term “The tax code,” a term that lacks specificity. There are hundreds of “tax codes” in the United States. The most well-known is the federal Internal Revenue Code. Every state and territory has a tax code, though with different names, such as revenue code. Most counties and many cities, towns, and townships have tax codes. So which tax code is being referenced by the sentence that begins with “The tax code”? Worse, how can one tax code (“’the’ tax code”) include federal AND state tax forms?

It’s easy to understand why tax forms rarely, if ever, included in legislation. Tax forms change from year to year. Legislatures, town councils, and county commissions don’t have the time and financial resources to amend legislation continuously to insert the latest version of a form. At best, legislation might contain a form template, or a list of fields or items that are required to be placed on a form. But surely, the idea that there are “15,000+” forms in whatever is that “the tax code” is beyond worrisome.

I wonder if the author of the AWS Machine Learning Blog can provide a list, with citations, of the 15,000+ forms that are in “the tax code.” Though I wonder, I very much doubt it.

I also wonder how many people read the AWS Machine Learning Blog and consider that sentence to be true. I wonder how many then share with other people their “discovery” that there are 15,000+ tax forms buried in “the tax code.” But I need not wonder how misinformation and untruths spread like wildfire, fertilizing the ignorance that is destroying civilization.