By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

    A few decades ago, Virginia law forbade the sale of a mule after dark.

    That may have been good law a few centuries ago, before the dawn of electricity when fast talking mule salesmen might take advantage of a needy buyer on a moonless night.

    The mule-seller lobby may have been slack or lacked pull in those days of a more agrarian Old Dominion.

    Government also worked at a slower pace and was closer to the people. It kept up with mule hucksters and tricksters.

    Why the law grew musty on the books into the last decades of the 20th Century—long after the state’s dreaded mule tax was eliminated—tells a tale on state government.

    Richmond still reacts slowly to crisis and even more slowly when change has left in place a skeleton of law designed to handle problems that have moved on.

    Virginia’s tax structure, and even its unique system of entirely separate and distinct cities and counties, may have fit the needs and the state’s modernity of the 1920s.

    Its application to the needs of the 2010s leaves the state burdened with baggy skeletons of outdated tax structures that weigh Virginia down.

    The state’s adherence to fiscal conservatism is not enhanced by a bag of old law bones that never seem to die, be buried, reconnected to modern needs or reborn.

    We just carry them around, as if weightier books of law carry the magic of relevance to when they were born.

    They don’t.

      Do cities and counties need a personal property car tax or a business, professional and occupational license tax in 2010?

      Yes and no. No if they are given more modern and fair means of raising revenue, and yes if they aren’t.

      Instead, the state chooses to venerate the antiquated and celebrate only the least efficient and partial fixes, such as a Rube Goldberg contraption that funnels state taxpayer money to every local government in Virginia to pay a portion of car owners’ local tax bills. We Virginians double-dip pay part of our car tax out of one pocket as local taxpayers and part out of another as state taxpayers. It must hurt less that way.

      Who said inefficiency lacks rewards? No one had to raise a tax to create a system in which every taxpayer paid himself tax relief and the ability to pay car taxes out of two pockets instead of just one.

      Is the gross receipts business, professional and occupational license tax, or BPOL, tax fair? No.

      How fair is it to tax gross receipts even if there is no profit? What kind of business incentive is that when creation of jobs is a major goal?

      Is it antiquated? Yes.

      People waiting in traffic on Virginia’s highways can rest assured that governors come and governors go but some laws, like old taxes, will hang around until people forget why they were passed.

      At least it is now legal to buy a mule at midnight.