The Combatants Spar and the Consumers Always Pay

“We held out as long as we could. . . . It will be a crisis if we don’t do anything.”

The Ventura County Air Pollution Control District wants to increase the annual fees local “polluting” companies pay for renewing their operating permits, according to “Agency Seeks Fee Hikes for Polluting Firms” (March 2). Under this proposal, dry cleaners, auto paint and body shops and gas stations could see a 25% increase in their fees in two years. The increases for “big polluters,” such as power plants, the petroleum industry and some factories, could range in the thousands each year, on top of what they already pay. And that’s just the permits.

Increased processing fees on “polluting” equipment are also part of the district’s proposal. And to complicate matters, that agency’s executive officer suggests that even more hikes may be necessary in as little as two years.

Needless to say, the business community, with that deer-in-the-headlights look, is shocked. It says charging companies more when their emissions are decreasing makes no sense, and it openly wonders if relief will ever be in sight.

And so the story goes. When news organizations cover events like this, what the people really need to know gets lost in what the parties involved want the people to think.

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Government agencies always claim that failure to act now could create a fiscal crisis (meaning short-term threats to their workers’ livelihoods) and the targeted industries always bellyache about paying too much already.

This back-and-forth bickering could be written off as just a silly game if the American public did not continually line up behind one camp or the other. That it always does demonstrates the potency of the stench of the “divide and conquer” mentality permeating every aspect of U.S. policy-making.

All of the verbal sparring and public animosity it creates could be avoided if the parties involved in such undertakings would simply tell the public the truth: A fee increase is nothing more than a value-added tax that consumers will wind up paying.

The vast majority of consumers / taxpayers have yet to catch on to this business / government power play. They do not realize that there is no such thing as a “cost” a company can incur that cannot, more specifically will not, be passed on to consumers via a rate or price increase. These people will continue to look at a proposal like this one and feel the companies deserve to lose money if they pollute. They will be wrong if they assume these hikes will diminish the companies’ profits in any way.

And most importantly, they will fail to see that once the dust settles in these government-versus-business skirmishes, their cost of whatever the companies paint, clean or produce will rise in proportion to the extra amount the companies had to pay. Moreover, these people will wonder why the only year-end profits that decreased seem to be their own.