Labor Mobility in America -or- the Cost of Becoming Virginia Jews

In my CRV, I'm apparently Virginia Jew #5159

Anyone who knows me knows that as a Jew, I could be considered a disappointment.  I wasn't bar mitzvahed, have never practiced the religion, can barely get past "baruch atah adonai . . ." and by the rules of the Mishnah, probably couldn't even count as a Jew unless I converted (my mom was born "Woods").  

But with a name like Daniel Jacob Epstein . . . well?  The Virginia DMV seems to have seen me coming and acknowledged us as members of the tribe (in her Camry, Jasmine Epstein is #5158).  I guess I'd like to think that I'm about as Jewish as Bernie Sanders, and perhaps that's good enough for government work.

Religion is not the topic of this blog post, though: it's about the cost of moving around the country.  

In theories of free market capitalism, resources (capital, labor, land, etc) are put to the most efficient (read: profitable) use when there are as few impediments as possible to their being deployed wherever they will fetch the highest prices.  In the case of capital, we have all kinds of laws, judicial infrastructure, and entire administrative divisions of government (SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, etc) devoted to smoothing out the functioning of markets so that the process of moving capital around is easy and cheap.

What about opportunities for labor to fetch the highest prices?  Especially in a country the size of the United States, for people to get the best jobs (which could be the highest paid, or the job for which the enjoyment of the job + the salary & benefits = the best return on the time & effort they put in), they often have to move somewhere else.

Of course, this explains why every ten years, states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan get apportioned fewer Congressional reps, and states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and California get more.  Indeed, driving through some of the cities of upstate NY (Utica, Oneida, Amsterdam), it's clear that people have been voting with their feet (or U-Hauls) for any number of reasons as the rust belt empties of inhabitants, but better employment opportunity is a big one.

But moving can be expensive--it's a big investment to pull up stakes in search of better opportunity.  Nonetheless, it's the American way: "Westward the wagons" and all that.  And if you're poor, or unemployed, it's not only a good way to improve your economic lot, but it's the key way that free market capitalist economics would prescribe.  And indeed, if a "flexible labor market" (minimizing barriers to people finding the jobs where their labor is deployed most efficiently, whether by facilitating businesses' ability to fire workers whose labor they are unable to deploy efficiently, or by facilitating workers' capacity to leave one situation for another where their labor fetches a better price) works they way that free market economics claims it does, then this process also should promote people getting out of poverty ("up by the bootstraps") and indeed reducing government expenditures on things like unemployment, foodstamps, and other means-tested benefits.

But while making easier to move about the country should have every advantage in a free-market economy, the United States have made it rather costly in a number of ways.

The Commonwealth of Virginia's legislature, for example, has mandated a number of fees for operating a vehicle in the state, here see the ones we paid to become VJW 5158 & 5159:

Title Fees for titling car in VA $10 x 2 cars =	$20
Minimum sales tax on $500 intra-family car sale =	$75
Safety Inspection $16 x 2 cars =	$32
Vehicle Registration 2yrs (w/discount) $79.50 x 2 cars =	$159
Out of State License conversion $32 x 2 drivers =	$64
Grand Total fees extracted from us by the Commonwealth of Virginia DMV =	$350

Now, for me & Jasmine, these fees are affordable, an expected cost of moving to this state in search of better ways to employ ourselves, and one of the reasons we saved up money before making this move.  And in truth, part of the reason we have to pay as much as we did is how privileged we are: a two-car couple (though with teenagers--the CRV is 12 y.o. and the Camry 18--we're hardly the most privileged of car owners), and in fact our second car is Jasmine's old one that we got from her parents for a nominal price (our good fortune).  Titling it under a new name, we had to pay a sales tax of $75 on the $500 purchase price (the tax rate is 4.1%, but there is a minimum payment amount that effectively meant we paid 15%!); had we not had the good fortune for Richard & Linda to let the Camry go for a song, we wouldn't be paying the fees for a second car at all!  And we could have registered our cars for only one year, instead of two, though the multi-year discount meant that latter was more economical, in the long run.

In the end, we could afford all of these fees, but imagine the situation of people with less means, who weren't lucky enough have a job that enabled them to save up like we could.  A family with two working parents might easily need two cars if they each had to work; the fees for operating vehicles in Virginia would be pretty steep for a family with an income of $2,500/mo (the SNAP cut-off--which two minimum wage jobs barely add up to, before taxes).  And why should there be a minimum payment for auto sales tax: if a someone can only afford to buy a car that costs $500 or $1,000, why are they paying the same sales tax as a car that costs nearly $2,000 (this applies even to Virginians who never cross state lines when buying cars).

If Virginia needs more resources to fix its roads and run its Motor Vehicle bureaucracy (where, I have to note, all the people we ran across were kind, helpful, and extremely efficient), why not take them out of income tax dollars paid mostly by people not in poverty, instead of multiplying "fees" that, while they apply to everyone, hit the poor and those who are moving house much more heavily than the wealthy and the comfortable?

As with Jasmine's non-transferable New York Medicaid, the United States are (plural) a pain for poor people: the "federal" system that empowers states to each set up their own special bureaucracies, redundant inspections (the Camry had to be re-inspected for Virginia, even though New Jersey had given it a clean bill of health 'til 2017 just a couple of months ago), and other powers that state governments claim a "right" to makes labor mobility in this country a costly prospect, especially for those in most want of economic opportunity.  Proportionately to income, this is the hardest for the poorest Americans--another way in which the system we have in our country today makes pulling oneself or one's family "up by the bootstraps" most difficult for those at the very bottom of the ladder.