Crap Rolls Downhill

The mayor of Omaha has proposed a tax on toilet paper.

The jokes just write themselves:

"It looks good on paper."

"It's a pay-as-you-go tax."

"You've got to be shitting me."

"We're already taxed up the ass."

But behind (sorry...) the hilarity is a serious issue.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated that Omaha - and many other cities - upgrade their sewer system to bring them into compliance with EPA codes.

“Plain and simple: [The sewer project] is an unfunded federal mandate,” Suttle told the paper. “The EPA isn't getting it. Cities across the country are going to be saddled with this horrific debt."

It's not just Omaha, and it's not just sewers. Other examples:

Today, the State of California spends over $12 billion dollars a year to comply with unfunded federal mandates alone.  The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Act and the No Child Left Behind Act contain just a few of the tens of thousands of regulations imposed on our state and local governments by our representatives in Washington DC. More than 12% of California’s state budget goes toward paying for compliance with unfunded or underfunded mandates.

By 2018, most signs in every locality in the United States must conform to a set of new updates to the Manual on Uniform Control Device, a set of federal codes that regulate everything from crosswalk signal timing to the placement of one-way street signs.

Local officials and officials country-wide contend in a time of strapped budgets and being forced to work with less, changing out thousands of road signs at thousands of dollars is a waste of time and money. They say the way they are now has never been a problem and it's just another frivolous mandate handed down by the feds while the feds are not helping the cause financially.

A state lawmaker testified today that the federal government’s unfunded mandates on issues such as clean air, clean water and flood zones are imposing costs on Nevada taxpayers without authority or justification.

 And it's not just the feds. States also pass on the costs of unfunded mandates to cities and counties.

Texas counties have long faced unfunded and under-funded mandates from the state and federal governments, whereby the state and federal governments pass the buck of paying for services decreed by the larger governments to the local governments – and the taxpayers of local governments.

Unfunded mandates impose costs on Texas counties and their taxpayers into the millions of dollars statewide and force counties to increase local property tax rates to pay for edicts from above – edicts most often in the form of legislation that is passed and sometimes from state agency regulations. High-dollar examples include indigent defense and indigent health care, but there are many other “nickel-and-dime” mandates that add up to major costs.

This practice is bad enough in good times, but it's particularly onerous today, when local and state governments are facing massive budgets cuts. Who cares about the "retroreflectivity" of road signs when schools are laying off teachers? Priorities, anyone?

It'll never happen, but it sure would be nice to see the size and reach of government - at all levels - shrink. It would also be nice to limit, cap, or outright prevent unfunded mandates. There was even a feeble attempt "...to curb the practice of imposing unfunded Federal mandates on States and local governments" via the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 (UMRA). Like so many other federal laws, it started off with good intentions but has failed to achieve its objectives.

Kind of like land wars in Asia and the Middle East...