Feed the beast

I often complain about the pitiless search for more revenue in Massachusetts.  In 1989, then-governor Michael Dukakis passed a "temporary" tax increase that has yet to reset to the original rate.  A couple years ago, Beacon Hill legalized gambling to bring in some sweet (consensual) taxation and we're waiting for the pot shops to blaze up.

But governments need money, money, money.  Hit and Run: "St. Louis Town Agrees to Stop Bankrolling Itself by Fining Its Residents into the Poorhouse."

A small St. Louis suburb has agreed to stop trying bankroll its government with a vicious regime of petty fines so excessive that the town has cited more than a third of its population.
...
Pagedale was one of those communities. In the course of a single year, it handed out 2,000 code enforcement citations—almost twice the number of actual households in the city. It tossed out tickets like confetti for a host of really absurd codes, which banned everything from mismatched curtains to holes in window screens to having your pants below your waist to having a barbecue grill or basketball hoop in your front yard to walking on the left side of a crosswalk.

The town's budget depended heavily on these fines. In some years, their proceeds made up a quarter of the city's revenue, according to the Institute for Justice. And the code citations got worse once the state cracked down to stop cities from trying to rake in money from traffic tickets. Eventually, 39 percent of the city's adult population had been fined for some sort of housing violation.

Somebody's going to have to pay for all those pensions.