Perhaps King County should also levy a special tax on shoes, strollers and wheelbarrows.
Dirty hippies with their feet, babies and dirt anyhow.
Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!
Please turn in all your unlicensed bicycles to the authorities or the Seattle Times.
I’ll be happy to pay $25 a year if I can assign all of my property taxes to bike trails rather than highways.
i’ like a special tax on golf, obesity, and suvs. you down, vese?
Wow, who says legacy media is dying? With groundbreaking local thought-leadership like this every week, it all goes to show just what everyone is missing by depriving themselves of newsprint.
I would have never imagined all the ways that yoga instructors and bicyclists have been bilking the state.
Wow!
Vesely’s wise thoughts </snark> must be the reason that the Times once again couldn’t find the space in their ever-smaller news sections for a single word about the PDC, McKenna, Rossi, and the Realtors.
Vesely is vying for the Dumbest journalist in the world prize – give out his E-mail or blog address so we can shower him with accolades for being dumb as a rock. On second thought, apologies to the rocks and geologists out there.
Has there ever been a dumber idea? $25 user fee for bikes. I can see the average family now – sorry junior you can’t ride with Mommy and Daddy, your tricycle fee is not paid.
Or fining kids riding to school, if they did not pay their fee. Did Vesely think he was being clever by saying that critical mass would help law enforcement? Is that what passes for humor down at the moribund Seattle Times? Hey, let’s put license fees on walkers, baby strollers, canes and walkers while we are at it.
I have a better idea for raising money. Let’s fine people for public stupidity. Vesely is first!
There is a pettiness associated with conservatives. Forget that all cyclists pay sales and property taxes or that many own a car. Instead they are reduced to some freeloading straw men that can be easily knocked down by a lame columnist who needs to fill some space on a page.
Blah.
I don’t care if cyclists pay license fees to help defray the costs of bike trails and bike lanes, or not, because their miniscule contribution to the enormous cost of these projects would be insignificant, anyway.
However, I do think all cyclists should be required to have license plates on their bikes and liability insurance should be mandatory for cyclists just as it is for drivers.
Only bicyclists who wear those spandex
onesies should be made to pay fees. Or is that too velodramatic?
I have to agree in general terms with RR; bikes are great, I’m glad people use them, but.. it is a problem that folks can just hop on the things and inject themselves into traffic. I don’t know what the solution is.
In theory cyclists pay personal property tax on their bikes. Autos are exempt from this, and there is only a perfunctory $30 registration fee, which basically pays for the registration program. If cyclists are property owners, consumers, or car drivers too, they pay the same property, sales, and gas taxes as everyone else. If someone is asking for a special tax for bikes to use roads, or bike paths, then the same should apply to cars, pedestrians, and so on. In fact, this might not be a bad idea.
Par for the course. Liberal editorial for a liberal society. I cycle 200 days a year. No surprise that people think about taxing everything that moves – usually dummycraps.
it is a problem that folks can just hop on the things and inject themselves into traffic. I don’t know what the solution is.
They usually wind up in the cemetary. Seems to me that Darwin’t theory works just fine. Again another liberal who thinks they can regulate anything and everything with “solutions”. When you’re done regulating you’ll be living in an egg shell.
Vesely seems to think that because someone rides a bicycle they aren’t paying taxes. A bit of faulty logic perhaps?
People should have to license their shoes. I mean, after all people use their shoes to walk on trails and sidewalks. Yes, it’s time for all those fucking freeloaders who walk on sidewalks (we know who you are and we’re coming to get you!) to start paying their share.
@8
I’ve been meaning to talk to my car insurance folks about adding my bike to the policy. I’ve never scratched a car, but it wouldn’t be that hard to do $500 worth of damage.
Thanks for the reminder.
Hmm…
Two things I would like to see come out of the state leg:
1) A state wide helmet law.
Some cities have helmet laws. Some cover everyone. Some just the under 18 set. Make it uniform state wide. All riders must wear helmets, just like motorcyclist.
2) Up date night riding requirements.
The state should require head and tail lights, just like on motorcycles. Currently a front light and rear reflector are required. Rear reflectors are useless and the car coming up behind you is a far greater threat than the one coming towards you in the other lane.
I use my tail light during the day all winter long and whenever I’m riding in heavy traffic.
The last thing we need is more laws on the books. What we need is for people to mind their manners and to be polite. There is no law for that.
@11 I’ll bet you could count the number of cyclists who pay personal property tax on their bikes on the fingers of a double amputee.
@12 Typical conservative anarchist — he’d rather have bodies littering the streets than traffic laws and cops to enforce them.
@13 The point of bike licenses is so you can identify the jerks who run down and injure innocent people and small furry animals to make them pay the medical expenses.
@14 A cyclist who knocks down a senior citizen and breaks his pelvis is looking at more than $500 of liability.
@15 It’s nice that homeowner’s and auto insurance covers the cyclist’s injuries, but how about the injuries that that aggressive and/or negligent bike riders cause to pedestrians?
@16 All the problems caused by aggressive and careless cyclists could be solved simply by banning bikes from sidewalks used by pedestrians and streets used by cars.*
* Just kidding! Rabbit humor. har har har
ROGER RABBIT And DADDY LOVE ARE F***ING LIARS!
State isn’t required to balance budget, but it’s still the goal
Many lawmakers have long believed the state can’t borrow money to plug the kind of budget shortfall the Legislature now faces. But that isn’t true.
By Andrew Garber
Seattle Times Olympia bureau
Repeatedly, the Leftist Idealogues and TEAM HORSESASS repeated this LIE! Gregoire said so over & over & over again in her campaign…to reassure voters that even though SHE has no fiscal restraint in her body, the Constitution protects WE THE PEOPLE from her recklessness.
Now we find out AFTER THE ELECTION, it’s untrue.
Gregoire was the former Attorney General.
She knew or should have known this…yet repeated the BIG LIE!
The Leftists know no bounds in there lying to the Public.
Of course, the whole idea of such a proposal is probably NOT to collect revenue from bicycles, but instead to discourage bicyclists, thereby reducing their numbers and their rising political power.
But the whole idea can be defeated with one ad, picturing some tyke looking at his bike with tears in his eyes, and a caption saying “I can’t even ride my bike anymore. My parents were laid off work, and they can’t afford the registration fee”.
Of course, if the newspapers were still delivered by kids riding bicycles, then the Times would be all up in arms against the proposals, arguing about how it hurts young “entrepreneurs”.
I look forward to the day when the Seattle Times no longer exists. It probably won’t be too long now.
The only freeloaders in this society are rich families that don’t think they need to pay their fair share in taxes.
Cynical @ 22: I’m not prepared to accept either the Seattle Times or you as the authority on this subject, and I don’t have the time right now to research it myself.
But the point of the article, which you adopted as your own position in # 22, is that the governor has to propose a balanced budget. Whether or not the legislature has to adopt a balanced budget is beside the point.
Rossi’s campaign, stripped of it’s emotional hot-button issues, was that voters should trust him to make the decisions required to submit a balanced budget. The voters decided that they would rather have Gregoire make those decisions.
Besides, can anybody ever remember the state legislature enacting an unbalanced budget? I seriously doubt they would do so.
So cynical, your argument is all smoke, and no fire. The governor has to submit a balanced budget.
Printed newspapers carry a heavy impact on the infrastructure and the environment.
The cutting of trees, making newsprint, using toxic chemicals to print the papers, heavy trucks to deliver the papers daily to distribution points, thousands of “independent distributors” using private automobiles to deliver the papers daily to hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses, and newstands daily add a large cost to our environment and our our highway infrastructure.
For the most part, it’s completely unnecessary. All the “news content” can be readily available online. The primary reason for a newspaper isn’t to deliver news, it’s to serve as a wrapper for all the advertising which gets inserted, either into the pages of the newspaper itself or the multiple insert pages. Online publication of the newspaper, on the other hand, carries with it only a nominal environmental cost. Yet the Times is being subsidized for the costs of selling printed paper, getting all the benefit without paying the real burden.
I say we should tax the Times for the real costs of printed paper which is currently being subsidized by the citizens of the Puget Sound region. Online editions would not be taxed.
I agree with Daniel K’s comment over at Effin’Unsound. Impose a bicycle tax (actually, a license fee) only if Metro’s park-and-ride lots start charging for parking. Even something as minimal as $1 a day would bring in immensely more than any bike licensing scheme.
The Madness of King Jim
It might be soothing to suppose that Jim dashed this one off without thinking too much about it. But we all have to admit that simply isn’t the case.
This one is such low hanging fruit that we risk being so overly eager to engage in the dissection we forget to asses the patient.
So you’ve got to wonder then. WTF is goin’ on inside that old man’s head? Are we witnessing prolonged syphilitic dementia being memorialized in the printed pages of a “major” urban daily?
Think about it. A newsroom and editorial desk cowed into submission by authoritarian management and constant threats of downsizing. Inbred, largely absentee ownership who, let’s face it, may not be the best judges of mental stability. Vesely could literally pee himself during a staff meeting and nobody would say shit to him about it.
Confirmation will come when Jimbo starts wandering around muttering “What, what!” all the time.
@18 You are right. But, bicycles are not exempt for the tax and cars are. That was my point.
RE: “he’d rather have bodies littering the streets than traffic laws and cops to enforce them.”
There wouldn’t be much littering. Take a look outside your car window today. Do you see bodies littering the streets with bicycles next to them? No. What a retard. It’s amazing how stupid liberals craft endless numbers of crisis that need more government. How about reality and common sense. If someone was going to jump off a cliff in the wilderness should we put signs and guard it with police and maybe consider laying a net below it with our tax money too?
I noticed Roger did not demand that senior citizens on fixed incomes be exempt from the bike tax. Is Roger slipping?
Just some non RR humor! Har Har!