Gouged By Soccer Bureaucrats

The tax-and-spenders in government have nothing on the amateur bureaucrats who run the Northern Virginia Soccer League, where our two older children have played the past few years. They just jacked up the price for playing from the $70 we paid for the spring season to $96 for the fall.

My wife, Kimberly, is as furious about that 35 percent fee hike as I am. We’ve griped to each other for years about the exorbitant $70, wondering what it covered. Now they’re charging even more — and the cheapskates don’t even buy any trophies for the kids from those fees.

We paid quite a bit less for our kids to play soccer in another the league when they were younger, but we changed leagues to save on gas and time. We’ll stay put for now because with gas now almost double what it was when we changed leagues, it’s still be cheaper even with the pay hike. But I’m going to do some digging to see what I can learn about how the league is spending its money.

New Taxes In The Old Dominion?

I used to think Virginia, my current home, and West Virginia, my birthplace and dream forever home, were quite different places. Western Virginians, in fact, used the Civil War as a good excuse to achieve a split that had been in the making for decades. The people on the two sides of the Appalachian Mountain range had very little in common.

Now that Democrats are in power again in Virginia, though, there ain’t much difference between west and east. This kind of news from the Old Dominion sounds an awful lot like the news I used to read regularly (and write as a journalist) when I lived in the Mountain State:

The Virginia Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to raise the gas tax by 6 cents, but officials in both parties say the measure has almost no chance in the House of Delegates, leaving many legislators to wonder whether any plan to pay for transportation will be resolved in the current special session. …

Senate Democrats ignored a proposal by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), approving a plan that would raise the gas tax over the next six years, increase the statewide sales tax by 0.25 percent and boost the tax on vehicle purchases by 0.5 percent. Together, the taxes would raise $452 million annually.

That’s two different proposals with the same underlying answer: tax and spend. Makes me wanna move to Montana.

About Those Tax Bites

I’ve been negligent in keeping the weekly and monthly tax bites updated on this blog. I’ve been too busy traveling for work or, as of tomorrow, vacation. I’ve been keeping all of my receipts, though, and I’ll do the math as soon as I find the time — just in case anyone out there was wondering.

Tire(d) Of Taxes

We haven’t rotated the tires on our Toyota Sienna since we bought it, so I took it to NTB this morning. One of the tires also has had a slow leak for the past few months, so I had that repaired. It cost about 50 bucks — plus another $2.48 in sales taxes.