Lege seeking fees from special license plates "to help balance the budget"

[texastoast]

I received an email today from the SPCA that the Lege is seeking funds from the fees Texas drivers pay for special license plates supporting the group.

And Yikes, I guess it's not just the SPCA.

http://www.thln.org/index.cfm?pageID=741CFCA6-3048-C277-11B45A8051E89CAC


The amount of appropriations from the Animal Friendly License Plate Account is now being considered by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations - subcommittee on Article II (Health and Human Services). We need to contact each member of that subcommittee and ask him/her to do two things.

1.Appropriate the full amount of money in the Animal Friendly Account; and
2.Authorize the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to move unexpended balances in the Animal Friendly Account from one biennium to the next biennium. The names and contact information for the members of that subcommittee are as follows:

Does anyone know if all the other license plates are at risk? I have a conservation plate, and damned if I'm going to pay a fee to give it to polluters and corporations that don't pay their fair share to begin with.

[white cloud]

1. Perry and Repiglican need a plate

with a big lizard on it.

[sonias]

3. Hey lizards aren't bad

Only republicans are bad. The only bad lizard is a lizard that has probably been raised badly by a republican.

They need a license plate with Tom DeLay behind bars saying "I made this!"

Now those might actually sell! :evilgrin:

[NoPasaran]

5. I'd buy one!

:rofl:

[hobbit709]

2. Just how many specialty plates do they expect to sell?

I'd like one to say "Made in a TX prison by Rick Perry"

[sonias]

4. Or Tom DeLay saying the same thing

Either way, vanity plates are not going to close the budget deficit. But lying about raising taxes, by calling something a "fee" is one trick they will use - liberally!

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-taxes/2011-budget-shortfall/a-texas-debate-when-is-a-tax-not-a-tax/">Texas Tribune 3/4/11
A Texas Debate: When Is a Tax Not a Tax?

If you’re a political lip-reader, taxes are not the same as fees, or surcharges, or exemptions, deductions and wagers.

(snip)
Producers of high-cost natural gas could be marks this year. Getting rid of an exemption that was meant to encourage that production would bring in somewhere between $500 million and $700 million. That would help, but the industry, which is politically powerful, calls it a tax.

The “quality assurance fee” for nursing homes is back on the table. It’s been around before, most recently in 2007 as an $8-per-patient per day charge that can be used, in turn, to match federal Medicaid dollars. That version would have added $400 million or so to the state budget. Nursing homes are wary of a legislative bait-and-switch, because they’ve seen it before. They need higher fees, they say, to stay open. They’d settle for the fees they get now, but the battened-down budget proposals would cut their reimbursement rates by 33 percent.

With the quality fee under consideration, the nursing homes can’t get in line for other money. When the fee — labeled “the bed tax” and “the granny tax” — died at the ends of previous sessions, they were left with nothing, because other sources of money had already been committed to other programs. Color them nervous.

Lawmakers can save $3 billion to $4 billion with accounting and timing tricks, like writing a 23-month budget for the 24-month budget period and pushing the expenses from that last month into the next two-year budget. They also have $1.2 billion in other proposals, offered in a thick “government effectiveness and efficiency report” from the Legislative Budget Board. Those include a pill-splitting program out on the frontier of financial creativity: The state could save roughly $700,000 by getting state employees to order their prescription drugs in double-sized pills, which could then be split at home to get the proper dosage.

Interesting to note from the article that Elliott Naishtatt's bill to close the Amazon.com loophole on collecting sales tax in Texas is being jumped on by Grover Norquist as raising taxes and therefore DOA to Republican lawmakers.

:shrug: