Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [65]
Augustino asks me where I am going. When I tell him, he rolls his eyes, because it is still many hundreds of miles away. I explain to him that I might not be back for a month or two. He assures me that, whenever I do, the wave runners will still be there. I believe him. Not that I really have much of a choice. I unhook the trailer, he puts rocks underneath the wheels so they can’t move and covers it all with a tarp underneath a shed, so that the elements won’t seep in.
And you know what? When I do come back to retrieve the trailer and wave runners three weeks later, there they both be, safe and sound.
It wasn’t the first time I’d run into problems over wave runners. When I became governor, I happened to own four of the personal watercrafts. The legislature had placed a separate tax on them that applied to no other boat, to hire police to keep the people who used wave runners in line. I was getting nicked $50 apiece, $200 a year, for this new surcharge that was, in my opinion, completely unconstitutional. It was the equivalent of putting a tax on all red sports cars. So I managed to have the surcharge repealed.
I was accused of getting laws passed to benefit myself or my friends. Well, my view is, what else can you govern by except personal experience? That’s why I also did my best to correct what I felt was a ten-year sales tax masquerading as something called license tab fees. You already paid a sales tax when you purchased your car. But, to be able to get your license plates, you also had to pay an additional fee to the state—a percentage based upon the price you paid for the vehicle. I happened to have bought a new Porsche in 1990 and, just to drive my car, it cost me upwards of four thousand dollars in license tab fees over the course of ten years.
How can you have a licensing system based upon the street value of the car? If you’re going to do something like that, then base it on the weight of the car—that’s what tears up the streets! A Lamborghini doesn’t, in fact it probably does less damage because it’s so aerodynamically perfect. Plus, this policy didn’t apply to motorcycles. You could have the most expensive Harley-Davidson or the cheapest little Honda 50, and the license tab fee stayed at a flat rate.
So, when Minnesota showed a budget surplus in 2000, I sat down with our Senate majority leader—a Democrat named Roger Moe—and Steve Sviggum, the Republican Speaker of the House. As you might expect, we all had divergent opinions on what to do with the surplus. Finally Moe came up with what I thought was a great idea. He said, “Let’s divide the surplus into thirds, and each of us can do whatever we want with our third.” That’s what we ended up doing. The Democrats applied their third to spending, which didn’t surprise me. The Republicans gave theirs back to the people in the form of mild income tax relief, which also came as no surprise.
As the independent, I decided to use my third—which came to about $175 million—to reduce the license tab fees to a flat rate: a maximum of $99 for any car more than a year old. This represented a savings of hundreds of dollars for many Minnesotans.
So my critics, in the legislature and the media, were absolutely right that I governed from a personal approach—taking on what I felt was wrong, as a citizen. Here’s another example: a bill was introduced at one point having to do with auto glass replacement. If you had a cracked windshield, the insurance company would be the one to tell you where to go to have it replaced. One of my best friends had his own little auto glass repair business, and I called him. He told me this law was bogus, basically being done to run smaller companies like his out of business. It wouldn’t help the consumer one bit, but the insurance companies could make more money. An attorney I knew verified this. I vetoed the bill. The legislature overrode my veto and passed it into law anyway. That shows you how powerful