Ithaca, New York, the most liberal city in America, has struck again. This time by looking to impose a tax directly on children.

The Ithaca Journal reports that Board of Education officials have proposed a $180.00 per year parking fee to be charged students who drive to school. According to the Journal, the fee would be applied to "things that will benefit all students," which, it turns out, consist largely of "positions which involve communicating with new families at the schools."

In other words, students are being taxed to pay for more bureaucratic fat at school. Niiiiiiccce...

The mentality seems to be the typical liberal one: that students who drive must be able to afford the cost. So this is just another way of "taxing the rich."

However, as with most liberal schemes, this ignores reality. Many of the students who drive to school do so because they have after school jobs, in order to pay for things that "rich" children may get from their parents gratis. But now, in addition to the usual taxes on their labor, such as payroll, they are being socked with Ithaca's own version of a commuter tax.

Faced with this tax, the students are already planning to do what many business owners do when confronted with taxes: looking for ways to avoid it. The Journal article notes that "according to parents and students...students will get around the fee by parking on surrounding streets."

So the kids now have their first lessons in loopholes.

And this lesson may be another reason why this scheme will backfire. By imposing a fee so high that no one bothers to pay it, the school may actually lose money (a fact one board member acknowledges to the Journal).

On the other, maybe this was a good thing. School is supposed to be a place for learning, of course. And, in this case, there would appear to be a lot of valuable lessons being taught:
that higher taxes often cause a loss of revenue; that people will look for a way to avoid paying taxes; that taxes on "the rich" often hurt the middle class and the wage earner.

As noted above, it looks like some of the children might even be learning these lessons.

The real question is...are the adults?