[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=30289399#p30289399:3jg2xar1 said:
This is like a toll. In theory, the tolls collected go towards whatever bridge, tunnel, or road they are placed on and once they pay off the cost of construction those tolls are eliminated or at least reduced to cover maintenance only. However, that is virtually never the case. The tolls become a revenue stream, and government is loathe to give up any revenue stream. So you end up paying tolls 30 years past when the bridge or whatnot was paid off.
What is the $5 paying for here? We have no clue. The OP mentions webservers and people to "handle claims". The Feds estimate 700k drone sales this year, more than double the previous year. So lets baseline at a million drones to register. I could put together a fully functional webserver to handle 1 million one time registrations with a simple search tool for a few hundred bucks a month. Let's add on typical government bloat and say one thousand, no lets even make it ten thousand a month. That's $120k/yr. Let's throw a few high paid and super qualified support personal in at $250k/year. And for giggles we'll say that there is some nebulous "miscellaneous" costs that run ridiculously high and get us to a $1 million/yr total cost (which is not unlikely given this is a government regulatory body).
Those one million registrations will generate $5 million in revenue, or five times of the crazy high total annual operating budget. And the registration is only good for 3 years.
I suspect if you had 100% compliance we'd see registrations over 2 million next year alone as this captures such a significant portion of the toy market. By 2024 the drone industry is projected to be an $11 billion industry.. You can do your own extrapolation of hypothetical registration revenue, but it will be exponentially higher than whatever the costs are to run a simple registration database.
So, like I said, rather than support a revenue grab I'd rather they just appropriate from the cash they already take from me.
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