Your Tax Dollars at Work Saving Idiots’ Lives
According to the Associated Press:
“…more than 9,000 motorists were ticketed for not wearing seat belts in the department’s two-week enforcement campaign… a total of 9,324 seat belt citations were issued. Divide that by 336 hours - fourteen 24-hour days - and you get 27.75 tickets per hour, or one ticket written roughly every two minutes.”
If you don’t buckle your seat belt, you have a greater chance of dying in case of an accident. However, I don’t feel it’s the government’s role to target and penalize people for being stupid. Speeding, running stoplights, blockading — these are all justifiable offenses for traffic enforcement. I’m all for spending our tax dollars patrolling vehicular offenses that directly affect other drivers.
As for legislating stupidity? Darwin knows what to do with those people.
See how much money your community has spent: according to the Star Tribune, “The State Patrol has written the most tickets at 1,023, followed by St. Paul police at 427, Roseville police 325, Edina police 242, St. Cloud police 214, Minneapolis police 193 and the Ramsey County Sheriff 181. Police in Rochester and Faribault have written more than 100 tickets.”
With rampant crime on the north side, random gunshots across Minneapolis, homeland security and growing illegal immigrant issues, how many thousands of our tax dollars were spent on this immediate and important issue of seat belt usage? Seems like our priorities are whack, if you ask me.
(photo stolen from here)
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the thing about seatbelt enforcement is that people are far, far more likely to die in an accident when not wearing them. and when people die in accidents, insurance pays out infinitely more than they do in an non-fatal accident.
in a no-fault state, that means you’re also paying for the idiots dying in car crashes because they’re not wearing seatbelts, probably more than you’re spending to fund the seatbelt-enforcement campaign.
I was about to write something very similar to Jenni so Instead I’ll echo her comments and add this: If a person is not wearing a seatbelt and ends up in a major car crash, chances are they end up in HCMC and the hospital shells out a couple hundred thousand dollars to save the persons life. If they have insuurance, they are fine, but then rates go up for everyone else. If don’t have insurance their life is ruined again. If (and it is if) giving out more tickets for not wearing a seatbelt reduces these burdens, i’m all for it.
In that case, shouldn’t we be fixing the medical system instead of using seatbelt enforcement as a backwards patch?
While it’s valid to raise the argument against a paternalistic law, I’m not sure you’ve got a good argument with the tax dollars argument. The reason is simple: the state is MAKING money on those tickets. The Star Tribune article claims that 9,324 tickets were issued in two weeks, at a minimum of $25 per ticket. That means in that time, the state has made $233,100. I would bet the state is not wasting tax dollars but making a profit with this law.
And that’s another legitimate argument: should the state really raise money by fining people’s stupidity? That’s a better argument than wasted tax dollars.
Wow, great point! I demand a rebate.
I think there should just be a general “Stupid Tax” which assesses a yearly tax based on your stupidity in the previous year. Obviously, this would be a graduated tax, with the stupidest people paying for a higher percentage of their stupidity than middle-and lower-stupidity people.
It’s my idea, so I’d assess and enforce the taxes.
I like Bixby’s idea, but I’m pretty sure the liberals would nix it because poverty leads to stupidity or something like that. (Because poverty causes everything, y’know.)