That ought to really help the minimum wage class struggling to make ends meet in Seattle. Who needs to pay for all that affordable housing when they can live in their cars and pay in installments with a $5 transaction fee which sounds a lot like the evil corporate banks liberals love to hate so much.

@1 This actually sounds more like those payday loans that we regulated. Can’t pay our big shiny new taxes because you’re poor? Try our installment plan for $5/mth. And you don’t get to save any on taxes.

Fuck this bill. It’s exploiting poor people on the most basic level: making them pay more for being poor.

Honest to fuck, a 'struggling family' who owns a 60 thousand dollar SUV can afford the increased car tab fees. So infuriating. Public services cost money dipshits.

Are the homeless changing their out of state licence plates and paying the new current licence tabs for their RV's and other vehicles for the right to park on the street? No

@2-if you are so poor that you can't pay your car tabs, but own a car that is so expensive as to make the tabs unaffordable, I would suggest that you are not thinking things through. Cheap car = cheap tabs.

I love all of this concern for the poor, which only seems to manifest itself when saying, “I was on the losing side of the vote and I don’t want to pay” would seem to carry little weight.

I drive a 25-year-old Mazda and was not only shocked by the $175 price of my tabs which I can’t afford, but they’ve slapped me with an additional $230 bill to buy them after a hold got put on for two 2014 parking tickets that slipped under my radar and were unaffordable at the time, so wow, all this makes no sense when people are needing to have their cars for work and it’s horribly expensive anyway. It’s all stacked against people who don’t have a lot of money and need to keep making it and can’t if they don’t get their tabs.

Rich liberals in Seattle don't give a fuck about poor people, in case you haven't been paying attention.

Can we just admit that maybe, just maybe ST3 was a rushed, flawed plan that was forced on the voters? I think some of the transit solutions are great but SLOG seems to think that this is heaven sent. Rich people who have "$60k" suv's (left hot take) can afford to pay this, they are not the ones getting screwed here its people who have 15 year old cars that are. The notion that we can just ditch our cars to ride buses and ST3 is a joke. Not everyone in king co lives in seattle, waaaaay more low income folks live outside of the city and work outside of the city and need cars to get to those jobs.

g2000 @9. So you write: Can we just admit that maybe, just maybe ST3 was a rushed, flawed plan that was forced on the voters? But then you challenge the fundamental premise of any plan, no matter how "un-rushed," that Sound Transit or any agency could have put forward--that taxpayers are going to have to pay now for something that won't be operational until years from now.

You say, I think some of the transit solutions are great... What, pray tell, are these transit solutions? Are you talking the ones that don't cost anything and provide immediate gratification?

And I'm still trying to process this statement of yours: Not everyone in king co lives in seattle, waaaaay more low income folks live outside of the city and work outside of the city and need cars to get to those jobs.

So you do realize Sound Transit is not restricted to Seattle. It's a regional agency with projects across the region--projects that are specifically designed to give commute alternatives to the very people whose interests you purport to represent. Let's imagine a counterfactual where we did as you would have wanted and rejected ST1 and ST2 and ST3. (And don't try to BS us that you were against ST3 but ST1 and ST2 were just fine. By your standards, no, they weren't.) Let's just imagine life for the low-income folks in the suburbs and exurbs now or 20 years from now if it hadn't been for Sound Transit's projects. Talk about the financial burden of low-income folks needing cars to get everywhere!

What's your next bit of concern-trolling for the working class, trying to liberate them from the economic burden of Social Security and Medicare?

@10 what does car tab taxes to pay for ST3 (that will take decades to build) have to do with Social Security or Medicare? Talk about concern-trolling.

@7 Two citations for illegal acts "slipped under my radar"? WTF? I haven't gotten a parking ticket for years, you just have to park your vehicle on public land legally.

Cato @11, oh really? Like g2000 couldn't just as well say the payroll taxes for SS and Medicare impose an unaffordable tax burden on the poor working class people of this country when it may be decades before any given individual stands to benefit from those programs? Or--and here we get into the more sophisticated concern trolling on those programs--"Who knows if they'll even still be around when you're ready to retire?"

Frankly, I thought you were a little less dense, considering the sophistication of your own resident trolling. Oh, like this typical garbage of yours @8: "Rich liberals in Seattle don't give a fuck about poor people, in case you haven't been paying attention." The voting patterns of Seattle and its precincts have consistently shown that rich liberals, um, do give a fuck about poor people.

Cato, this may be hard for you to take, but have you ever considered the possibility that nobody who reads your comments is amused by them?

@7 You can't afford $175 to register your car? Really? Give me a break.

@9 The car tab fees are based on the value of the car. One would think that poorer people would have cheaper cars and therefore the increase would be considerably less onerous. I was actually expecting the cost to register my car to be higher than it ended up being last year. Oh and pretty sure most of the whiners are in fact 'rich liberals'. Of course doesn't sound too good to be complaining about the cost of registering your Mercedes so we'll spin some nonsense about 'struggling families' instead.

Consider: it could be a lot worse. Car tab fees could be based on all of the adverse effects that driving has that you are currently not paying for. Then $175 would really look like a pittance.

Rhizome @14, in fact the whole outcry over the MVET valuations had to do with newer, more expensive cars being overvalued. So, in keeping with the gaslighty, Orwellian state of our politics, the actual issue was the tax was too progressive and yet this got cast into the tax being somehow regressive.

Just keep this in mind every time you hear folks in this state complaining about how some proposed tax is regressive. Most of these people couldn't care less about the regressiveness of the tax or the working poor they pretend to champion. (And not that I'm a fan of every proposed tax that comes down the pike. I wasn't too happy about the soda tax or the sales tax for the arts.)

Cressena get on that high horse and ride lil buddy

Cress ST3 does shit for you unless you commute to downtown & most of King Co residents never go downtown.

g2000, I feel bad for you that you feel compelled to descend into taunting rather than explaining what you meant by "I think some of the transit solutions are great." Would love to hear your perspective on useful transit.

Anyway, I'm sure Sound Transit has a breakdown somewhere of how many projected rides that are going to be served by ST3 projects actually have downtown as the starting point or destination. I bet the percentage is not as high as you would think. And here's another thought. I almost never drive on I-405 and I avoid I-5 anywhere south of the Ship Canal at all costs, and yet I have the ability to step outside of myself and appreciate that those corridors are useful and valuable things for the region as a hole. And I feel that appreciation the most when I'm on the bus to work on SR-99 and thinking about all that I-5 traffic that could otherwise have been on my route.