commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

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... of Automobiles

Dec 19/ 04: Parking Promises

Folks all upset over the "Nats" here in WashDC, what with the city making promises to MLB and keeping but half of 'em, and promising the other half again and all that. If the city's gonna get baseball again, it's gonna have to play ball, which means giving Major League Baseball what it wants: a stadium and rent free. DC being the home of populist politics, the people -- excuse me, The People -- will not pay. Well, MLB wants  'em to, so the Mayor's gotta get his money some how, since the City Council is all principled and all that and won't pay. So here's the latest plan:

Parking Fees Nearby Could Alleviate Stadium Funding:
D.C. Considers Proposal That Would Provide Money Needed Now in Return for Firm's Profit Later
A plan to raise $100 million by charging for curbside parking near a new baseball stadium has emerged as one of the leading proposals in the District's bid to find private money to finance the ballpark, city officials said yesterday.

A tax, you see, is not a tax if it's a tax on automobiles. For all the railing, for all the damnation, like cigarettes, for the guvmnet, automobiles are bad up until they're money. Can't tax something that doesn't exist (see The Prohibition for a lesson on this theory). I didn't realize that parking fees were a general tax. Even in China, parking fees have some automobile-related purpose:

Parking Fees To Rise In Beijing
Parking fees are set to rise in Beijing as part of plans to boost public transport usage. With traffic rising, Beijing will also upgrade public transit buses by 2008. At the moment Beijing has 1.09 million registered parking places, insufficient to meet the city's needs. By the end of November this year, the total number of motor vehicles in Beijing reached 2.27 million units.

Like the cigarette tax, the idea is to make motoring expensive and wean folks off the automobile habit. They do this in Europe, by the way, with its extreme gasoline taxes. Five bucks a gallon is not a market price.

The history of taxes and automobiles goes back to the first automobiles. Speeding fines, then license fees, then parking fees, then gasoline taxes, then horsepower taxes, and on and one, up to today's luxury taxes and EPA fuel targets -- enforced with fines -- one of the most expensive taxes on the American public of all auto taxes (and the reason for the SUV boom). Taxes are government's way of saying we'd like you to do otherwise. Now, in DC, we're getting quite the opposite: please, please park here -- we have a stadium to build.
 

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