It only applies to businesses, not government, of course. My question is, if they are collecting $50 million per year, why are my fees still so damn high? I already pay over $1,000 per year to register my family's three cars, and to put my name in their database. Now they are collecting money from selling this information.
> My question is, if they are collecting $50 million per year, why are my fees still so damn high?
Well, the CA DMV has like 70 offices across the state. Even if you just calculate the portion of the cost for processing driver license management, registration, etc, it'll easily eat those 50 million USD + whatever the total driver license etc fees are.
I hate interacting with the CA DMV with quite some passion, but I don't see how those 50 million USD are really the problem. If anything, the DMV seems under staffed / financed. Partially that's management problems, sure, but I don't think that's all.
Random anecdote: I moved to VA back in the 99-00 period. The then-new governor had made improving DMV part of his resume projects, and spent a boatload of money on improving several aspects - more hiring, tech upgrades, and some process upgrades like creating different lines for different kinds of business and a ticketing system so you could sit until called.
It was a great experience. show up, someone ( no waiting!) asks me what I'm there for and hands me the appropriate form (circling the actual areas I needed to answer) and gives me a ticket. in 5ish mins I was called up, handed in my form and papers, and they processed my new ID, sending me to a second area for a pic and to get my ID. Total visit time: less than 15 mins.
Several years later, after a new governor and the inevitable budget cuts, most of this was gone. Still had the intake, but no one helped me decipher the form, and the wait was much longer. The atmosphere was similarly dour, with a big crowd of people that just wanted to get this errand done but had to wait. Total visit time: over 1 hour.
But the basic contrast showed me how much of complaints about govt slowness is just a matter of funding/staffing.
I moved from CA to MT 20 years ago and my first experience with the DMV (MVD in local parlance) was transformative. No line, friendly helpful employees. Not the result of some governor project: we just always had efficient government, presumably due to low population and small town values.
I recently had to figure out how to register a vehicle bought out of state: rather than research online it was quicker and more pleasant to just walk in and ask.
I moved from CA to MT a few months ago. Same experience. I've wanted to hug the DMV people here every time I've gone because they are so nice and helpful.
I’ve had the good fortune to get to the DMV before it opened to meet an already snaking line and then have the privilege to wait in line about 4.5 hours and then take a half hour to complete my appointment.
That’s the DMV in San Francisco —Daly City in this case because I can at least find parking.
Registration fees fund highway maintenance, the CHP, and other services that are necessary to be able to drive your car. They’re not just paying for the DMV itself.
Given that the fees don't cover things like offsetting the impact of a car’s CO2 emissions, you might even ask why are your fees so damn low?
> But California’s effective tax rate is even lower. The effective tax rate is based on the market value of the home, and the most recent property tax bills for the county. In 2018, the state had an effective tax rate of 0.76%, according to Irvine, California-based ATTOM Data Solutions.
California’s effective tax rate ranked 36th in the country, with the average property tax bill coming out to $5,354, according to ATTOM’s data.
That lower effective property tax rate is because so many properties do not change ownership for decades or for generations, while property values have posted healthy increases, Mr. Soroy said.
There's no "of course" needed - for example, in Europe the GDPR also applies to government institutions. There's an exception that allows you to process data if it's necessary to fulfil the requirements some other law (doh), and for most gov't institutions there are explicit laws and regulations saying what (and how) they must do; but other than that they have all the same restrictions on data processing as private institutions.
So if the new California privacy legislation is being abused by certain government institutions, that's not an unavoidable situation, and the voters should keep pressure on their representatives to amend these laws and change that.
I think that the "of course" was intended more as an ironic or even fatalistic comment that the government wouldn't _want_ to hold itself to the same standards as those eeeevil corporations, rather than implying that it shouldn't do so.
Government is not a single entity with shared interests. Often the elected lawmakers do want to hold all the bureaucrats in the many government institutions accountable and light their butts on fire for any transgressions - after all, people using the DMV have much more votes than DMV officials.
I agree, we should dispose with the cops. Private security for those who have bootstrapped themselves into the means to pay for it, sure, but that's it.
I know you're being sarcastic but there's valid reasons for a municipality to just award a contract to the best value bidder for policing the same way they do for other services.
If the 3rd party screws up and gets sued the taxpayer isn't footing the bill so they have incentive not to screw up. Every time the contract renews you have an opportunity to go with a totally new organization whereas even the best efforts at refreshing a government department wind up as a sort of ship of Theseus. A 3rd party also has a damn good incentive not to treat people badly because they are the customer and they have a contract renewal hanging over their head. A 3rd party also has no incentive to spend big bucks operating MRAPs and other military toys that are not relevant to the job at hand. It probably makes sense to retain investigative work under the government umbrella (avoids some conflicts of interests) but for routine patrol duties, security and traffic detail there is no advantage to having official government police instead of private security, at least from the perspective of the people being policed.
A lot of societies current gripes with policing would be mitigated under the incentive structure that having a 3rd party contractor gets you. I'm sure other problems would pop up but I don't think they would equal or surpass our current problems so it would be a net improvement.
Private prisons seem to be a good counterexample here. Not only does the profit motive lead to inhumane conditions and perverse corruption, such as the Chicago(?) judge getting a kickback for every juvenile sent into the system. The outsourcing of that "monopoly on power" OP decried exaggerates any problems inherent in the government<->citizen relation: civil servants at least have a certain professional ethos, swear an oath, are usually invested in a long-term career, have pensions to look forward to (and not risk), are subject to far more rules (FOIA etc), can mostly not escape liability through bankruptcy, and so on.
Privatised security is an almost prototypical dystopian nightmare. Look no further than TSA. Millgram might have fudged his data, but the idea that giving someone a uniform and power over others tends to awry is still somewhat plausible.
Other examples: those rent-a-goons shooting civilians in Iraq for sport. (With, by the way, double the salary and many military toys not relevant to the job at hand). The US health system also comes to mind, only that you would have even less choice to chose your local police short of moving.
I've generally had better experiences with airports whose TSA screening is contracted out to third parties (eg. SFO) than those where it's done by the government agency itself (eg. JFK, Boston Logan).
I seem to recall similar stories from Louisiana and Florida, except the Florida one also involved digging up bodies from unmarked graves around the "boot camp" for delinquent juveniles. My memory is suspect, so maybe do your own research.
There's also the movie "Holes", the book it was based on, and the reality it was based on. "Boot camps" are plagued with corruption, abuse, and neglect all over the US. Wherever you are, if you dig deeply enough, you are likely to find someone profiting from children's misery.
BTW this sort of happened in Camden NJ. Continually crime ridden and poor, it's the East St. Louis of Philadelphia. They had problems negotiating with the fire department and police for years over budget cuts, contract negotiations etc. Eventually they fired the entire police force and created a joint one with the entire county of Camden. Things seem to be working slightly better since then.
Anyway I am sure I got some details wrong, it was fairly interesting news when it all went down.
Outsourcing risk to a third party contractor is an amazing way to get transparency, efficiency and responsive government.
Look at the US military procurement programs. By getting unaccountable soldiers out of the way, we have cost-efficient, effective contractors saving the taxpayer money every day.
Building roads, writing traffic rules or enforcing them just isn't amendable to optimisation using your preferred mechanism of free-market economics. Or, more accurately: competition only works for rather large competitive difference needed to overcome the natural friction introduced by the difficulties of moving.
It's painful to see that people seem to not even be aware anymore that our societies have yet another organising principle beyond capitalism, namely democracy.
Sure, you never agreed to be somewhat dependent on "society". But there just isn't enough land to live in the anarcho-libertarian fantasy where you don't have to find compromises. And the standard hyperbole of the "threat of violence" makes even less sense if you unquestioningly champion capitalism while rejecting democracy, because capitalism also relies on the ultimate threat of violence, as anyone not paying their rent will notice sooner or later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...