2008 Republican debate at Reagan Library: on Tax Reform

Mitt Romney: Raised service fees like highway ads, from $200 to $2,000

ROMNEY: We raised fees $240 million. Not $730 million. Facts are stubborn things. We audited our fee increase, because, of course, we cared. Now, why did we raise fees $240 million? We had a $3 billion budget shortfall, we decided we were not going to raise taxes, and we found that some fees hadn’t been raised in as many as 20 years. These were not broad-based fees for things like getting your driver’s license or your license plate for your car, but instead something like the cost of a sign on the interstate and how much it was going to cost to publish a McDonald’s or a Burger King sign on the interstate. We went from, like, $200 a sign to $2,000 a sign to raise money for our state in a way that was consistent with the what the market had done over the ensuing years.

Mitt Romney: Fees are appropriate for the government to provide services

A: I mentioned fees, and it’s appropriate if the state is providing a service to someone that’s not a requirement to have a car or a driver’s license, but instead, let’s say, we’re going to be taking out an oil tank from your back yard because it’s leaking into the ground and the state’s going to provide that service. But to charge a fee sufficient to do so makes a lot of sense. So the fees ought to be adjusted from time to time to compose the amount of what the cost is of providing that service. If there hasn’t been a fee raised in a couple of decades, you probably have some inflation in there you ought to adjust for.