SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
In the wrong place at the wrong time? Tough luck, says the state of Colorado. If you are arrested the police will charge you a $25 booking fee. If you can't pay on the spot, don't worry, they'll bill you. Even if charges are dismissed, or you are aquitted, you still pay a price! But fear not, if you can prove you are innocent (beyond reasonable doubt) you can get your money back. This is not something new, but something that people should be aware of.
Charon writes:
There is a case before the US Supreme Court, Nelson v. Colorado, which will be argued on Jan. 9, regarding the difficulty of getting fees and penalties refunded when defendants are found innocent.
And it's not just Colorado. Another case from Minnesota:
Corey Statham had $46 in his pockets when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed.
But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham's money as a "booking fee." It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. In the end, it cost Mr. Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.
The Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear Mr. Statham's challenge to Ramsey County's fund-raising efforts, which are part of a national trend to extract fees and fines from people who find themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by schad on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:44PM
We give the government money in order to provide us with certain essential services. But the government spends it foolishly. The extra money from the property tax increase? It goes to a shiny new computer lab that nobody ever uses. Meanwhile, our students still sit 2 per desk in an "expansion classroom" (aka a shipping container sitting in the parking lot) and share 1970s-era textbooks. And next year, another tax increase is on the ballot to "support our failing schools." This time it gets spent on a new field for the high school football team, leaving open the door for more tax increases in the future. And on and on and on.
You can only suffer through this for so long before you start to view all tax increases as just an opportunity for the government to increase its power while delivering absolutely zero return.
Of course, everyone in the world thinks that his government is wasteful and inefficient. We all wish that the government would focus on the services that we consider essential instead of the ones that those other guys do. But I do feel that we Americans, to a greater extent than any other developed country, get an appallingly poor return on our tax dollars. And so it's not unreasonable to reflexively oppose all tax increases. I mean, it may well be the wrong response, but... look at how shitty the government is at practically everything it does. Can you really blame anyone for thinking that the only solution is to throw it all out and start over?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 30 2016, @12:37AM
I don't. I agree. We've made a lot of discoveries and our technology has advanced a whole bunch since the last time we started over. We can at least get something that works much better than this creaking, decrepit cesspit of corruption and dynamic atrophy.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 30 2016, @12:52AM
The problem I'm seeing here is accepting with incomplete evidence the idea that government always spends money more foolishly than the private sector does. Especially when there are cases where the government has been noticeably more efficient than their private sector counterparts, like:
- The US Postal Service is substantially more cost-effective at moving things from one place to another than FedEx or UPS.
- Medicare and Medicaid get more health care work done per dollar of spending than any of the private insurers in the US. The Veteran's Administration does even better than Medicare and Medicaid. And government health care systems like Canada's NHS also get more bang for their buck than the US private insurers do.
- Municipal water in most cities is both safer to drink and better tasting than bottled water, especially bottled water that doesn't come from municipal water supplies.
The reason everyone thinks "Government always sucks" is that you only hear about the bad experiences. For example, hardly anyone fires off a blog post of "Mr Jones at the USDA is a really reasonable, dedicated and conscientious public servant doing his best to balance the goals of farmers, farmers' neighbors, food consumers, and the long-term environmental effects of their activities." And that sort of thing almost never finds its way into the news. What that means is that when the government is working properly, you probably don't even notice it or know who's responsible.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday December 30 2016, @05:26AM
But it never gets thrown out, it just gets starved enough that it can't afford to actually do anything but pay people to sit idle at their desks.