Money from duties goes into the general treasury fund. That is nothing new.Originally Posted by flowerseverywhere
Money from duties goes into the general treasury fund. That is nothing new.
my article did not mention grants. Strictly prices going up due to tariffs.
ok. I was mixing concepts, sort of touching on bae’s notes about grants to his operation.
As you point out, untangling the current system properly would involve a bit more planning and complexity to achieve than simply turning off the switch. In the case of my community, we are taxed heavily by the Federal and State governments, who then return to us a small fraction of the money we send them to “help” us. We could probably afford easily to pay for most of these services if our money never left the County, and they didn’t tax us.
In the broader arena, some events that can occur (hurricanes, earthquakes, …) typically produces expenses that local communities and regions cannot afford to react to, or even plan for, with the resources within their boundaries. This is why things like FEMA exist. One could certainly imagine getting rid of Federal/regional agencies that provide this sort of expertise and disaster relief, and replacing it with some sort of mutual-aid society/insurance scheme in an anarcho-syndicalist sense, but again, the transition to that Bold New World is more complicated than the current regime seems to understand. And if you create that solution, it tends to look a lot like a government, but with a different name.
What is the size of your agency, and the composition?As an aside, our fire protection services in my tiny town is not funded by taxes, it is privately funded, and I do not understand how that possibly works but it seems to work,
Mine has 2 full-time professional firefighter/paramedics on-duty 24 hours a day. To maintain the shift schedule, that requires 8 full-time employees. (This is a standard shift structure across the nation). Each of those people gets a burdened salary in excess of $150k/year. Then we have ~70 volunteer firefighter/EMTs. Each of those, though volunteer, has to be tracked and trained as if they were a full-time union firefighter/emt employee. Which is expensive. And then, we have the administrative staff to deal with all of this. We have 7 fire stations on this island, only the main station receives the 24x7 staffing.
Our total budget is around $4 million/year.
Our ambulance service charges in the following fashion:
- if you live here, we send you a bill, and then forgive any portion of the bill that your medical insurance, if you have any, does not cover. We switched to doing this a few years back when we realized people were paying for insurance that would cover this, and not receiving the benefit of their insurance, instead in essence ending up double-paying for the same thing.
- if you don’t live here, we send you a bill, and don’t write off the amount not covered by your insurance.
For context, the simplest ambulance call, having someone sit in the back of the ambulance and get a bandaid, still requires the ambulance to be put back into service (sanitized/sterilized, restocked), a process that takes about an hour for two people if you do it by the book.
okay-----manya the parts that are made for rehabbing old, junk cars are manufactured in Asia, and that made them affordable. Even if it didn't meet the "Buy American-Made" ideology. But yeah---many small American businesses import and resell them in America. See? Especially car parts that are chrome-plated. Yup. So, yeah---that's gonnaaa be a negative, on account of tariffs. Hopefully, it won't last too long. Meanwhile, i can repair some steering columns i have lying around here. Hope that helps you kids some. Thank mee.
I have no idea. My general impression is that no one is full-time. My town has a population of 2,500. There is one other municipality of about the same size in our county. Between the two of them I imagine they cover the county. I do know that in a recent fire of size downtown, equipment, and staff came from outside the county. This fire was in an old Victorian commercial building that was attached to other buildings so they had to save the attached buildings which they did.
the Emergency Medical Services system here is a tax supported district and is separate from our fire department.
NYT article on small businesses and tariff impacts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/b...e=articleShare
Since all of this tariff stuff started, I have been reading product and food labels. Much to my surprise, many of the health and beauty products are manufactured in Canada from foreign ingredients. Even my crackers and cheese are made in Canada. Trying to understand what tariffs apply to what category of products is to confusing to unravel for my brain though.
I’m the only one at work who can keep it straight.
Shipments via international mail that are under $800 have been duty free, even since de minimis went away. Well, that goes away at the end of the month. They've figured out better procedures on collecting and paying the duty.
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