by Pa Rock
Taxpayer
I was fifty-years-old in early 1999 when I received my first passport. It was for an educational trip that some friends and I were taking to Russia and Sweden. I don't remember the fee for that initial passport, but it apparently wasn't too outrageous or I would remember it. While I had that ten-year passport I also visited Mexico, the Caribbean, a couple of countries in Central America, and Great Britain.
My second passport arrived ten years later, in 2009. That is the passport that I had when I lived on Okinawa for two years (2010-2012) while working as a civilian social worker for the U.S. military. That document allowed me to visit such Far Eastern destinations as Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. I also spent a few days at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival through the good auspices of that passport. - and that same passport went with me to Cuba in 2016. Again, I don't remember the fee for that passport renewal, so it probably was not too burdensome.
And now my second passport has expired, and yesterday I sent in an application for my third. This time I will remember the fee. Our government demanded that I grease its palm with $110 before it would provide documentation that would allow me to travel abroad. It asked that I please make my check out the the "U.S. Department of State."
I guess I am old school, but I prefer to see the government fed through taxes and not propped up with arbitrary special fees set by bureaucrats with no legitimate powers of taxation. If the government chooses to empty its treasury to allow tax cuts for the wealthy, that does not give it a right to try and make up its necessary operating expenditures through ripping people off with services that it should be providing at little or no cost.
Politicians like to rail against higher taxes when they face voters, but they always find a way to generate revenue when it's time to feed the pig.
I guess I shouldn't complain. It costs real money for U.S. officials to stay at Trump resorts, after all!
Taxpayer
I was fifty-years-old in early 1999 when I received my first passport. It was for an educational trip that some friends and I were taking to Russia and Sweden. I don't remember the fee for that initial passport, but it apparently wasn't too outrageous or I would remember it. While I had that ten-year passport I also visited Mexico, the Caribbean, a couple of countries in Central America, and Great Britain.
My second passport arrived ten years later, in 2009. That is the passport that I had when I lived on Okinawa for two years (2010-2012) while working as a civilian social worker for the U.S. military. That document allowed me to visit such Far Eastern destinations as Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. I also spent a few days at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival through the good auspices of that passport. - and that same passport went with me to Cuba in 2016. Again, I don't remember the fee for that passport renewal, so it probably was not too burdensome.
And now my second passport has expired, and yesterday I sent in an application for my third. This time I will remember the fee. Our government demanded that I grease its palm with $110 before it would provide documentation that would allow me to travel abroad. It asked that I please make my check out the the "U.S. Department of State."
I guess I am old school, but I prefer to see the government fed through taxes and not propped up with arbitrary special fees set by bureaucrats with no legitimate powers of taxation. If the government chooses to empty its treasury to allow tax cuts for the wealthy, that does not give it a right to try and make up its necessary operating expenditures through ripping people off with services that it should be providing at little or no cost.
Politicians like to rail against higher taxes when they face voters, but they always find a way to generate revenue when it's time to feed the pig.
I guess I shouldn't complain. It costs real money for U.S. officials to stay at Trump resorts, after all!
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