Somedays, a theme just emerges from the news chum. Today’s theme is how we are all paying for the state and federal gridlock over debt and how to deal with it:
- Getting It One Way or Another. Last Saturday, the provision of the law that required excise taxes on airline tickets expired. So what does this mean? Technically, it means that airlines shouldn’t be collecting that tax for tickets starting last Saturday; if you bought your ticket earlier, you should be refunded the collected tax. What really happened? Most airlines have raised their fares to keep the same price, pocketing the tax as profit. As for that tax they collected? They are keeping it as profit and insisting that the IRS refund the money, even though the IRS has asked them to refund it (as an aside: Erin is flying to Portland on Monday for college visits—do you think Southwest will refund the tax… I’ve asked, but so far no response).
By the way, 4.3c of the gasoline tax expires on September 30 (and we already don’t collect enough funds to keep the Highway Fund solvent). If it actually happens (which it could, given the way congress has been of late regarding income), do you think we’ll actually see gas prices go down?
- Picking Student Pockets. We’ve all seen the continual increase in tuition at state colleges, especially here in California. But they aren’t just increasing tuition. Some colleges are constantly increasing fees to cover declining state support. Fee increases are worse, becaue financial aid often doesn’t cover fees. Perhaps private universities are the right idea.
- Paying for the Privilege. In Illinois, tolls are going up… so that the state can pay for more highway projects. This actually isn’t a surprise. As people drive less and cars become more fuel efficient, the amount collected for highway funding in gas taxes decreases… yet the roads get older and the cars do the same amount of wear and tear on the roads… and repairs get more expensive. Somethings gonna have to give….
- Red Light District. In what is big news here in LA, the city has admitted that the tickets you get from red-light cameras do not have to be paid. In fact, that’s one reason they are stopping the program. So what if the ticket put the fear of God into you and you paid it? Thanks for the contribution. Unsaid in these reports is the ticket status of the LA Metro Red Light cameras on the Orange and Blue lines. My wife got an Orange Line ticket…. that puppy with traffic school was over $600!
- Getting Out of the Business. One way to not have to pay to it is to move the service to a private operator. That’s just what LA City is talking about doing with the LA Zoo. One operator would be GLAZA (the current non-profit that sells food at the zoo). They would likely be OK. The other is a theme park operator. The city would retain ownership of the animals and the land. I’m not sure this is a great idea.
P.S.: I’m sure many have noticed that Livejournal is having trouble this week. The Distributed Denial of Service Attack behind the problems even made Time magazine. The Moscow Times reports that the scale of the attack costs about $15,000 to organize. The DDOS attack targeted the company’s Internet service providers in the United States, Qwest and Verizon, taking them down for about five hours on Monday, with even stronger attacks on Wednesday. One article gave more specifics: “Even reserve console was out of order, that would help us understand what is going wrong with the network equipment, therefore the only source of information for us and other clients were providers. Later on DDoS Mitigation Protocol was set and launched, by results of which we saw that incoming traffic amounted to 6 Gb with 8 Gb peaks, which is, obviously, the upper limit for Qwest and Verizon.”. LiveJournal, which was big in the US in the mid-2000s, is still the largest blogging/social media site in Russia, and has been under attack because it provides a needed outlet for free speech for that community. The US operations appear to be collateral damage.
