"Dude" wrote in message
...

And then we could use the money to buy gear and pay controllers instead of
creating an all new department to manage the fee system!


Up here in Taxachusetts there's a long-standing feud over tolls on the
Massachusetts Turnpike. The law that authorized the bond issue to build the
pike said, tolls will be charged until the bonds are paid off, then the
tolls shall end. Well, the bonds were paid off more than 10 years ago, but
the tollbooths persist. A couple years back when the debate flared up, the
tollbooth defenders said, "well, if we quit collecting tolls, the state will
need to come up with that $200 million some other way." Funny part is, the
accountants opened the books and figured that staffing and maintaining the
tollbooths cost the state about 60 cents on every dollar of tolls they
collected. So the net cost to the state of shutting down the tolls would be
only $80 million.

Of course, the tollbooths remain. I feel quite certain that long after the
nuclear war with China, when the whole world devolves into a Mad Maxian
opera of barbarity, the last functioning piece of the government of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts will be running the tollbooths on the
Masspike...

-cwk.