Mr. President! Free Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean!

Mr. President! Free Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean! Please join fellow GOPUSA activists in petitioning President Bush for a full pardon for Agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos.

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Finding ways to tax Americans without their being aware of it seems to be the name of the game for politicians and bureaucrats, and generally what should be readily transparent to taxpayers is deliberately obscured.

For example, we usually don't think of the fines that are generated by our local police or sheriff's department for traffic and other infractions as taxes - or, city and county fines for violations of building codes, or OSHA fines for workplace safety violations, or FCC fines for inappropriate radio and TV programming. Many of these fines can be exceedingly harsh, especially for small businesses or non-profits, many of which have a hard time staying afloat.

Just about every government agency levies some sort of fines for infractions of various rules. And, although estimates of potential revenue from these sources are included in the annual budgets of most government agencies, they are really just another form of stealth taxation. As far as I know, other than city councils, county boards of supervisors and the like, not one citizen of any community ever has the opportunity to vote on them.

Property has often been confiscated and sold, even though the owner was not involved in anything criminal, and they did not have to be accused or charged with a crime. The police have been able to go to court and, without a trial, obtain a court order to confiscate and sell the property of someone who was suspected of a drug crime. The mere fact that the property was involved in some way has been sufficient. The theory that makes this possible is based on "a technicality in the law that allows the government to claim that it is suing only the item of property, not the property's owner."

Even if that's justice, what happens to the money?

Between 1991 and 1995, Federal confiscation of property under the forfeiture laws increased by 1500 percent, to a total of $644 million. And, seizure of property by state and local governments also amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the amount of money that's generated by forfeiture laws is only a small part of the total funds received by government from fines and penalties, ranging from the lowly citation for illegal parking to major penalties imposed by agencies such as the SEC, FCC, etc. For example, in 2004, Time Warner agreed to a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that included a $750 million fine. And, in 1995 the international accounting firm KPMG agreed to pay a $456 million fine to the SEC in a case that involved tax shelter investments.

When an agency takes in a fine amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, the money disappears into the black hole of government accounting, and no one ever seems to ask what happened to it.

The explanation usually given is that these fines are levied to recover the costs of investigation and enforcement incurred by the agency involved. However, funding of government agencies does not appear to be reduced by the fines and penalties it collects in excess of those amounts that may be built into their budgets. If that's the case and the investigating agency recovers more than the amount of revenue budgeted from this source, why isn't their funding reduced accordingly?

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