Car Fees and Parking Tickets Are a Tax On the Poor

The rich fear taxes that will confiscate their wealth, but the poor already are subject to confiscatory taxes--though they’re called something else.

Now, the sales tax is un-progressive because the rich and the poor both pay the same percentage rate. But at least with sales tax, you have the some choice about paying or not--if you don’t buy the item in question, you don’t pay any tax. But consider car registration, car insurance and parking tickets. Driving might be a privilege, but cars are essential to making any kind of living.

I’m an ink-stained wretch by occupation, writing and editing news copy part-time, supplemented with minuscule royalties on my books and various kinds of free-lance assignments.

I ain’t rich. I’ve had more experience than I’d care to remember dealing with parking tickets because, for instance, my car died on a street-sweeper day. The street sweeper rarely came, but the meter maid always did. No matter what pleading notes I left, I was fined.

Now, if I owned a house and had a garage and driveway, this would have never been a problem. But I’m a tenant, a renter, and my landlords don’t provide garages. So I’m a second-class citizen who has to park on the public streets. Or consider the time I decided to pay for auto insurance--which after all is mandated--and had to put off my car registration to do so. That meant I’d have to pay Gov. Pete Wilson a hefty late charge, but that was only the beginning of my troubles.

I got stopped in Glendale for having out-of-date registration. So I had to pay the late registration right away. Somehow I swung it, and went to Glendale Municipal Court to show them I had paid, thinking that would be the end of it. But no, they wanted a $135 fine, too. I had been cited for a technical violation but it turned out to cost more than a moving violation, where I might have put someone’s life in danger by running a red light or driving too fast. Who, I wondered, was the victim of my inability to cough up for my car registration?

Not having the $135, I appeared in traffic court and told the judge that I felt like I had recently been set upon by highway robbers. I told her I felt like I was being treated like a criminal--for the crime of not having enough money. The judge, Dona Bracke, assured me that driving with an expired registration was indeed a criminal charge. But then in her Solomon-like wisdom, she gave me extra time to pay the $135, but upped the fine from $135 to $175.

Parking tickets, car registrations--these are punishing taxes. It’s sort of like Original Sin--you exist, you’re human, you’re poor, you get punished. That’s what I call a Republican kind of tax, better even than the flat tax. To get to the balanced budget, all they need to do now is criminalize breathing the air.