Not a great idea

I've noticed a trend in government and I'm not sure I like it. User fees. More and more, governments are trying to get a handle on the spiralling costs of doing business by implementing user fees. It makes sense on the surface. If you want access to a particular resource, you should pay for it. This in the interest of keeping taxes to a minimum. It makes financial sense too, because the cost of maintaining the resource is paid by those who use it.

But there is a flaw in this logic. Justifying user fees to pay for something implies that those who want or need the resource are willing to pay or even can afford to pay. But in an economy where the haves and have-nots are separated by a wide margin, this is a naive assumption. What this ideology in fact can lead to is making it so that only the wealthy can afford the resource and/or reducing the pool of users to such a small number that the resource can no longer be sustained. In the case of a luxury resource, few may care. But what happens when it's an essential resource? Think about that the next time your government proposes establishing user fees.