> “The bill would hold any officer, manager, partner, beneficial owner, or member of a shell company personally liable for any unpaid taxes, and any interest and penalties on those taxes, the nonpayment of which may constitute a crime, due on the purchase of a vehicle, vessel, or aircraft.”
Is dumb.
You want comprehensive enforcement with reasonable penalities.
Gas leaf blowers are a menace to society that should not be allowed in any urban or suburban area. (If you want to use one on your farm or whatever, go for it.)
There are some unavoidable sources of noise, so I'm not sure a blanket noise restriction is going to work. If someone is doing home renovation and the contractor needs to run a saw for a while, it's just going to be loud. Sometimes someone needs to jackhammer up a slab of concrete. Etc.
But gas leaf blowers are easily replaced by a much less neighbor-hostile alternative.
A month ago, I heard a lot of very loud jackhammer noises at 2AM. I got up and went out to investigate. A crew was jackhammering up the street. The foreman saw me and came by to apologize. The water main had broken and water was flooding the street. If they let it wait until morning, a lot of erosion damage would have been.
I told him I appreciate the crew coming out and fixing it right away.
The ban is useless because the only way to enforce it is to catch it in the act (in my town). Basically impossible. So it is a ban that could be enforced (other ways) but instead is just a suggestion - and not one that most people follow because there are almost no repercussions.
There is no such thing as “random” enforcement. Laws built this way end up getting abused against minorities (racial/ethnic or political), the poor, or personal and political enemies.
I don't think it will hold up in federal courts. This seems to apply to cars that the company officer who lives and drives in Montana as well. If this only applies to cars used more than 50% in CA is would hold up. Of course truck drivers who mostly don't drive in CA but that is home may find an out with that plan.
> If anyone running the business is a California resident (by the updated definition outlined above), then the whole business is a California resident, and any assets (including Lamborghinis and Bugattis) held in the state are subject to California taxation.
I'm relying on the paraphrasing in article rather than the text of the law itself, but this says that it only applies to assets held in the state.
The core of the law, ie who is expected to register their car in CA and what state sales taxes need to be paid has already been in place for years and likely already challenged. This is just a modifier to address a particular loophole.
As long as nothing about this crosses state lines (ie they’re not trying to regulate out of state businesses or property) there’s not a lot to go on. Several states have taken similar steps to close this loophole. Famously the YouTuber whistlindiesel got arrested in Tennessee for this and the case is still pending
Details matter and the article may have them wrong, but my reading is this accidentally covers out of state cars as well. I'm not going to look up the law to see who is right though.
The cars are registered in MT but they’re under CA jurisdiction if they are primarily driven here. That’s the literal loophole. CA is not trying to force people to pay CA registration and sales tax on cars kept and used primarily out of state.
That is the intent of course. However it is really easy to write a law that missing important details and so despite the intent cover all cars regardless of where they are used.
Paying tax on a vehicle driven in a state is not unreasonable. And holding the executives of a shell/numbered/privately-held/tax-dodging organization liable for taxes owed is not draconian.
Next headline: More wealthy people leaving California.
These shenanigans with vehicle taxes happen whenever a neighboring state has a significantly better deal. People register vehicles in friends or families names who live in that state, or form a legal entity there which can own the vehicles. Of course then the high-tax state writes more and more convoluted definitions of "residency" for the vehicle to make it subject to taxation, which are either hard to discover/enforce as a practical matter or someone finds a new loophole and the avoidance games continue.
What are you talking about? HN was a site for people aspiring to BE the rich, in the sense that it was operated by and revolves around a startup accelerator.
I don't know where you heard this, but it is not true. HN is filled with people with many opinions about the rich, and also many rich people, and has always been.
Startup News, created by a founder of the venture capital incubator Y Combinator, did not ever uniformly hate the rich. It is sponsored by the extremely rich, and only exists because they wished it into existence and maintain it.
No wealthy person is going to save money by relocating from California to avoid a $30-40k tax bill on an exotic car. Wealthy people have a beach house in California because they like California.
The people who relocate to avoid taxes are upper-middle class people who are overextended on their finances.
Well they go through the trouble to form an LLC in Montana to own the car, to (illegally) avoid that tax bill. So clearly the tax isn't something they are just happy to pay. The LLC probably owns the beach house too, for some other tax dodge.
But you can’t buy a beach house in Montana.
The point being they still prefer living in California while mooching off residents who paid for the roads they want to drive on.
Disagree - wealthy people don't become wealthy by giving all their money to the government. Expensive cars generally retain a decent value, but the taxes paid evaporate.
Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
Because not paying is tax evasion. If you go abroad, purchase a $50k watch, get a VAT refund then fail to declare, US Customs will fine you and probably pull your trusted traveler status. Are those people going to leave the US?
A wealthy person would spend much more than the tax bill on an exotic car just in relocation costs
> Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
There isn’t one, nor was there ever. You always had to pay CA sales tax on cars that were primarily used in CA.
The majority of people who did the Montana “loophole” in California were always overextended yahoos trying to save 40k to look richer than they are. It was always illegal to do in CA. This was the kind of shit YouTubers and dentists who “know a guy” did
It adds up. And in a state with tens of thousands of high net worth individuals, that marginal tax increase might be the nudge that causes a few of them to relocate to a lower tax jurisdiction.
Our willingness as a society to tolerate the expense, danger, and health issues brought by extensive car use will be looked back on with bewilderment. You can start to see the insanity when a 'classic' car drives by. It's noisy, heavy, dangerous, and smelly. It's allowed to noticeably pollute any area it passes through. We've made progress, but that level of noise, danger, and pollution is how every car on your street used to be.
Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.
Our government created a vast, expensive, open to use resource in roads and infrastructure, offers minimal restrictions an licensing for its use, barely enforces existing safety laws, and the combustion crowd shows outrage at the loss of their illegal activities.
I wish our culture was less tolerant of this behavior. It is a tiny percentage that costs the rest of us constantly. Sometimes its a motorcycle club, others it just rich people shucking the social contract. I'm looking forward to the last Harley getting recycled.
>Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.
I'm a newcomer to this hobby, and am amazed how this resentment has perpetuated since their muscle cars were neutered in the 70's by emissions regulations. The resentment has transferred to subsequent generations who were not alive then, who still complain about all the emissions and efficiency efforts that carmakers undertake. Too much unnecessary machismo hanging around.
I am not overfond of Harley noise; and I understand that some people really object to the VOC-smell of poorly-tuned carburetors...but this is a bit much.
There's artistic merit in historic industrial design & engineering, and keeping those things in an operational state; for which I am willing to tolerate the occasional puff of blue smoke.
How many are you alleging me to have killed? Last time I checked, that was wrong no matter how you might do it. Do you struggle to avoid temptation when you have the means to kill and must choose not to?
I find walking with transit more freeing. You can just go anywhere, no dealing with parking nor worrying about a massive expensive vehicle. You don’t need to apply for a license and take classes before you can do it, and people of all ages can safely participate. No worrying about taking the same modality back either.
No it isn't. Choices we make must consider externalities, tragedy of the commons, etc. Otherwise we're not bearing the full cost of and responsibility for our decisions.
I've seen car dealers in MA use Montana dealer plates. At the very least they are cheaper, avoids $220 / year excise tax and registration fees vs. $25 for Montana. I don't think it helps with any sales taxes- dealers don't have to pay when they buy cars, unlike customers. It would help if dealer uses the car personal reasons instead of just having it for resale.
Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..
The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.
I think the reqs were 12 years old and $171 or $271
Coming from $300/yr colorado insurance its a steal
I'm full time in a camper right now so this entire conversation is extra fun because I don't have a physical address anywhere which is a whole other ball of worms just insuring and registering my truck.
this is actually happening in california now. a lot of people are using dealer plates on expensive cars they just drive around normally. no registration, no taxes.
Can I just take this moment to mention that I think we need a better system for car registrations across the board? I don't like that there are all these edge cases with titles, insurance, inspections/smog, window tint, plate expiry, taxes etc whenever you move or even travel. It feels like we've just turned vehicle ownership into a profit opportunity for the police to harass everyone over completely inconsequential nonsense the second you cross any state line (emissions/insurance aren't nonsense but bear with me pedants). Similarly it creates a mountain of work every time you move.
I wish you could just register under an LLC or trust or something wherever and have a generic plate that can go anywhere and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country.
Alternatively allow people to keep their plates indefinitely like phone numbers. Yes, this creates arbitrage opportunities but maybe we should be bringing up the standards of the arbitrage states instead of having assholes threaten everyone with guns for random infractions.
Someone could compile every vehicle regulation from all the states into one common list. It'd be more restrictive than any single state, but it would be consistent. And if someone doesn't like it, they can fall back to their local laws.
this pretty much exists. thats where the malformed plate info generated by Fluck gets input and results in drivers of partial match plates 4 to 6 states from the away getting pulled out of cars at gunpoint. registration is just a different dataset in the same system. 20+ years ago most PD dispatches had a terminal dedicated to out of state registration lookups... today its in the patrol car.
Moves to different states are just not that common for the average American, and I would prefer for states to retain the power to implement their own policies in this area. I would not want to see e.g. California unable to change emissions policy because Texas isn’t on board.
Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
I’m not sure what you mean by not that common. The ta millions of people a year- yes maybe it’s only ~1% of the population, buts it’s one percent every year, and I quarter you it’s no evenly distributed.
I'm not going to remove my legal tint to comply with rules for a state I don't live in. It's incredibly unlikely I'd get pulled over for it, but it is possible if a cop wanted a reason to pull me over.
Yes because people can't be expected to make expensive modifications to their vehicles while visiting another state. And the law in Minnesota is ridiculous especially in situations like a Crosstrek vs an Impreza. They have the same body but the allowed tint levels are different because one is classified as an SUV and the other as a station wagon. I could lift my Impreza and make it look exactly like a Crosstrek, but the tint would still be illegal. I find that funny.
There are limits on the laws of a State when it involves inter-State commerce.
The US Supreme Court recognizes a general principle that you can transit a State with things that are illegal in that State. An individual State cannot impose a de facto ban on commerce between States, which includes the right to transport goods through a State in the normal fashion regardless of the laws of that State.
I'd be interested to know what case recognizes such a general principle. I would recommend not publicizing that you are transiting with cannabis from Oregon to Montana through Idaho, for example.
IIRC, the pivotal case involved individuals arrested for possession of illegal firearms while staying in a hotel. The firearms were being moved between States and were legal in both the origin and destination States but not in one of the States they were transporting them through.
The court viewed this as unconstitutional interference in the commerce between the origin and destination States, which seems correct on its face. There must be evidence of intent to distribute the firearms in the State where they are illegal. This case created a safe harbor for mere transport of goods between States.
Cannabis is different because it violates Federal law. It is technically illegal everywhere even though it is legal under State law in many locales. The Federal government has chosen to not enforce this law in States where it is legal, largely because enforcement could create a Constitutional case that could bring into question Federal authority to enact those and many other laws.
I know the interstate commerce clause often is used to justify some things that don't really seem to pertain directly to commerce, but we're talking about a law that's ostensibly a safety/accountability feature on road vehicles. I'm not convinced a court would allow you to like, drive without a seatbelt if you drove a car without seatbelts from a state where they won't required (not sure if there are any of these left? New Hampshire didn't require them when I was growing up in Massachusetts, but I haven't lived there for over a decade now so I have no idea)
I have a 1965 Mustang that I could legally drive without seatbelts in Massachusetts if I wanted to, as it was originally not equipped with safety belts.
Buying a car in the past when laws were different does not seem legally equivalent to buying a car today in a jurisdiction with different laws. It might be in some cases, but my impression is that the law is perfectly capable of distinguishing between those circumstances and it's possible to have them treated differently.
If you go by the letter of the law (your legal residence is another state) then you should apply it uniformly (your vehicle's tint is illegal where you currently are). You can't pick and choose which technicalities apply to you.
If you go by the spirit of the law, then a grace period would be reasonable to apply to infrequent visitors. However, you travel there daily, so that does not apply and you are violating the spirit of the law.
Their tint law is stupid. See my previous comment on Crosstrek vs Impreza. Also, I've never heard of anyone getting pulled over for tint unless it's like really dark, so I'm not concerned, just pointing out it's ridiculous.
Every time somebody decides to ram their suburban up the ass end of my car and flee the scene, the first thing the police ask is "did you get a good look at the driver" followed closely by "did you see the make/model/plates" and "what state was it registered in?" I don't have a lot of sympathy for windows dark enough to prevent me from making out the driver, the blatantly illegal license plate hiders so common in CA, and other such nonsense. If we want to adopt a policy of registration/licensure/insurance/whatever not being legally required for privacy reasons or something then that's one thing, but current policy tries to make sure people are responsible for their actions with a relatively small impact on privacy, and unless you're arguing against the broader issue then I think any tint law complaints are misplaced.
>the first thing the police ask is "did you get a good look at the driver" followed closely by "did you see the make/model/plates" and "what state was it registered in?"
If your argument for this law is that it forces people to incriminate themselves, that's really an argument that the whole thing should be thrown out.
Under no circumstances should you be able to be compelled to assist in your own prosecution, either directly or indirectly.
That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
Your position boils down to: "I should be able to commit traffic violations anonymously because anything else is an infringement on my 5th amendment rights".
Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
>That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
You are requiring someone to take action that will assist in their own prosecution. That is the goal as per your own statements, and is the obvious primary purpose of these laws.
If that is not compelling someone to self-incriminate, what is?
>Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
No, i'm saying that if you make a law whose primary purpose is to assist in the prosection of those who are compelled to follow it, that law is invalid. If you make a law that incidentally requires someone to assist in their own prosecution, then the law may be valid, but the usage of that information in prosecution or investigations is invalid and falls under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
I see no difference between it and compelling people in court to testify against themselves, because the only difference is where the self-incrimination is happening.
You're certainly entitled to think the law of a state you don't live in is stupid. The state you don't live in is equally entitled to not care whether people outside the state think a law is stupid.
>Also, I've never heard of anyone getting pulled over for tint unless it's like really dark
Idk about the rest of the country, but in my experience in the southern US it's a pretty common tactic to pull you over for assumed illegal tint to try and catch you for other charges. Especially if you aren't white.
Except that states want their pound of flesh; California is definitely no exception.
There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.
It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.
Window tint isn't nonsense, either. I think every stanced-out pickup with a tinted windshield should be apprehended and destroyed the instant it crosses my state's line.
States have so many variances on what kind of tint is legal and sometimes just absurd rules. For example, Minnesota has very little limitations on tinting SUVs but strict limits on cars. A Subaru Crosstrek is pretty much a lifted Impreza. The tint on my Impreza is illegal in Minnesota, but would be legal if it was a Crosstrek.
I once heard the red tape and slow workings of our fractured government explained as a buffer against easy exploitation. Makes sense on principle, many inefficient entities doing things poorly have a much smaller blast radius than a single streamlined system. It feels like bullshit, because of this type of annoying stuff, but maybe it has some merit too? In the age of cyber security exploits and our complete ineptitude at doing anything about it… not sure which side of the fence I’m on lol.
Nobody seems to recognize how deranged it is that we drive around with easily identifiable numbers plastered on our vehicle. This has seemed weird and privacy-violating to me since I was a kid, yet even today when people complain about Flock cameras they don’t complain about what the cameras are looking for.
What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?
And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.
Do you wear a name tag in public with your SSN, or some unique identifying information on it? If not, why not?
If I asked you to vote on this, would you vote in favor for it?
Why not? People can strangle other people so it makes sense to know who is who at all times in the case that someone strangles someone else and then tries to run away.
If this isn't making sense yet - This is as sensible as expecting software engineers to walk around with equipment that prominently display uniquely identifying information because computers can be used to hack and doxx people.
The fact that license plates were/are necessary is to address shortcomings of technology.
Most states in 2026 are slowly removing the need to display license plates at all because it never made sense but had to be done to address shortcomings that are no longer so in 2026.
If you think that the chances of a random person strangling someone else is the same as the chances of a person with a gun shooting someone else, I'm not really sure what to tell you.
We used to do this in Wisconsin for hunting. Large permit tag you had to clip on your back, looked just like a license plate. They got rid of it about a decade ago when everything was going digital.
It is worth considering that without being able to identify people then only unacceptable behaviour that rises to the level of needing and having an immediate response could actually be punished.
It's the qualitative change than comes with the change in quantity of monitoring that means being identifiable is so much worse now days.
There are no "absolute" rights. All rights you have are limited by the rights other people have. You don't even have a truly absolute right to your own death in most places.
It's only required on public roads. You can drive on your own property all you like without plates.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
That's funny. The vast majority of people's "own property" they could drive on would be on average about 50 feet. I grew up on 3/4 acre lot, and my dad let me drive up and down the drive way to practice before I had a license, so I get what you mean. Just funny that it's such a bold suggestion knowing that it's applicable to such a small number of people
I'm pretty sure, most of these weird laws are for farmers/ranchers. For whatever reason, they chose to word it more generically that sounds ridiculous applying it to everyone. Just like the whole red dye diesel, farmers just get special carve outs to give them a fighting chance on surviving to be able to provide us affordable food.
That is more because the gas tax is intended to pay for the roads. Red-dye diesel is declaring your intention to use the vehicle exclusively off-road, and thus not needing to be subject to the gas tax.
I contend that the only sensible way to measure freedom (of which privacy is an aspect) is within the context of societal interactions. It's not particularly interesting to move to the middle of nowhere and be able to do do what you want while not interacting with others (what it takes for "on your own [real estate]" to be meaningful). The pertinent metric is how well society can maintain a level of individual liberty (ie tolerance) as it scales up in density of interactions.
And nobody said anything about wanting to be unaccountable for harm. Rather it's a matter of being vulnerable to ne'er do wells. When we get a US GDPR equivalent with teeth, develop a widespread societal taboo against the surveillance industries, and so on, then we can talk about an equitable tradeoff with accountability for harm. Until then, the dynamic is an overwhelming vulnerability.
That analysis seems pretty confused to me. Freedom without accountability for harm to others is nonsensical.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
Nobody but you has said anything about "freedom" from accountability for harm.
The specific harms are exemplified by things like Flock, but also individual businesses tracking, private investigators, etc. If you want to stop that harm other ways, I've already agreed that I would find that acceptable. But until something actually changes on that front, it's not really an argument!
Given modern technology, we can imagine different ways that would provide less of a general vulnerability while actually providing more of the accountability you're putting foremost. Imagine say e-ink plates or a radio beacon that rotated the broadcasted identifier every minute, only being linkable through a database with an audit trail, etc.
Tell that to felons. Or people with diagnosed mental health issues of certain types.
The idea of a "right" is hilarious. Whenever you have an entity (like a government) that has the power of force or imprisonment over you, everything is a privilege.
I can't think of very many "rights" that haven't been abridged, curtailed, or violated by governments in ways that have been held to be legal when reviewed by courts.
> And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)?
That's just the US being stupid and using driver's licenses as primary identity documents. (And if you don't have a passport or other ID document, you're part of that problem.)
(Fun fact: I have 2 passports, 1 driver's license and 1 residence permit. None of those have my address. To be fair, they all have my DOB, that's really considered mandatory for any ID document around here.)
To be fair, it's only privacy-violating if you have access to a way to lookup who owns the blue Toyota Corolla with license plate 1ABC234. The Driver Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to disclose PII based on a license plate
A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.
Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.
Unless you're willing to spend money, you can't just go online to find the registration info for a plate number. It's not impossible, but it's definitely not as simple as flipping through the pages of the phone book to look up someone's address and number.
I don't think it's deranged at all, driving is a privilege not a right, you need a license for it, and a license for almost anything has requirements to follow.
The requirement to identify the vehicle for enforcement of the licensing requirements is not at all strange.
Don't get a license if you don't agree with the requirements for it. Would you be saying the same thing for aircraft?
Don't plate numbers technically belong to records held by the state? They aren't really private information for an individual (and I think you can request new numbers at any time, no?).
I think the only reason we enforce showing the plates is so the police can easily see if a vehicle is allowed to be on the roads from their own vehicles during traffic stops. We don't have police out patrolling for gun owners, but if we did I bet we would see more public "gun registration plates" for convenience purposes.
As for drivers licenses at bars, again, it's just convenience. We could split all that info into separate little cards and only show what we need to, but we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
> we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
That's not "low risk"; that actually happens, a lot. Many bars and supermarkets will scan the barcode on the back of your license when they do the check. Of course everything on it goes into a database to help build a profile about you.
The beauty of digital licenses (ie as implemented by iPhone) is you can restrict the information provided so e.g. a bar or grocery store only gets your age.
This is the cost of living in a federated republic. Power is diffuse across the states so they all have different opinions on how to go about things like vehicle registrations and insurance. The only alternative is for states to relinquish the power over vehicle registrations/plates/insurance requirements to the federal government which could enforce a universal standard, but I'm sure given current events you would see why that would be a terrible idea.
I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.
> and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country
To rephrase, you're asking that the same license plate work across all of the European Union.
To realize why this is unrealistic, one has to go back to history and understand the core concept of the United States of America. It's right there in the name itself. It was a compromise to unite and bring agreement across all these disparate states that were in their very own right entire countries (and most, even till date, most states in the US continue to be larger, geographically than most countries in the world), agree on some very basic terms so there could be trade across them, kind of like the European Union.
> but this current system is Kafkaesque
Of course, this license plate registration thing was optimized for tax and fee collection, and it does that job very well. All it takes is for someone to run for office and say they're going to overturn it all.
That standardizes the visual appearance, but not the semantics or issuance of the plates. EU residents are generally required to re-register a car when changing which country they reside in, which in turn has its own rules for what constitutes permanent residence.
And by comparison, all jurisdictions in the US and Canada have long agreed to a common set of physical/visual standards for license plates, despite variation between jurisdictions on the rules for registering vehicles.
I do love the variety of license plates in the US and Canada. My favorites are the bear shaped plate in NWT and the reproduction small plate in Delaware. Those are the only two I can think of that fall outside of the standard shape but are still.compatible with the screw hole pattern.
I was with you in the first paragraph. As I was reading I was reminded of old Cold War-era Soviet Union.
You lost me in the next paragraph where your solution was to centralize even more into a committee that has the power to bulldoze over more locally relevant needs and desires
Even within California there are smog-exempt counties. This makes perfect sense, things like excess NOx simply don't matter if the population density is low enough which incidentally is also true of a lot of the rest of the country. CA is the strictest with smog-related, going as far as barring federal (non-CA) vehicles from being registered unless they're 7500+ miles on the odometer. Tint should be limited to 70% VLT nationally really, but that's another topic. Other than that some north-eastern states have safety inspections which makes total sense given the rust. By developed country standards we have it very easy.
I ran into a fun one when moving out of the country. Chrysler Town and Country I had bought in Washington state, we were flying out from CA. My thought was to unload the vehicle in the last week before flying.
Except no one would buy it, not even Carmax or any of the other "cash for cars" places! Turns out, the car was originally manufactured for Canada, and California doesn't recognize the Canadian smog regulations, even if the car was functionally identical down to the catalytic converter. No one would take the damn thing because they couldn't re-title it. I finally found one guy who would who seemed like he was taking a decent sized risk, but since I gave him a good price he decided he'd just give it his best shot. For all I know he may have had to (illegally) drive it to Nevada just to sell it.
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
> some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN
It's kinda same in California. A license plate is assigned to the car, unlike some other states. Note that the US is nominally a federation of sovereign states, most especially when it comes to property and taxation law. In this context, California : US :: France : EU.
its not abusing a loophole. if something isnt in a state for more than 50% of the calendar year the state should have no claim to it. its a federal matter at the point cross border taxation IMO.
As a reminder, we’re talking about a (hypothetical) 183-day rule for car registration here (as opposed to the ~30-day one we currently have, which makes loopholes that we discuss here absolutely impractical).
The UK system associates the plates with your car. This incurs basically two pieces of paperwork online when you sell it, one of which is also annual taxation.
The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.
> However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates".
We don't call fake IDs either a loophole or "ghost IDs". When presented as identity documents, they're fraudulent identity documents. It doesn't matter if that ID is being presented to a bouncer in order to get in to a bar, or to everyone who cares to look at your car's bumper while it drives down the motorway, it's still a fake ID.
> A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.
Only these are "ghost plates". So called because the letters appear faint, or ghost like, on ANPR cameras.
Using illegal plates, either ghost ones or cloned ones (where they're real plates but for the wrong vehicle) are not loopholes, any more than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff is a "loophole" for property ownership.
Nope: moving to California just to attend school does not grant residency status.
It’s not 30 days it’s 20 but it isn’t “bringing into the state”, it is becoming a resident of the state, and that has more requirements than just showing up for a month.
The car wasn't registered in my name, it was registered with my parents and I was an authorized driver. Realistically, it's a question for the insurance company I imagine. Can an authorized driver have a driver's license from another state? Seems like an odd geographic limit for a national insurance company to make.
Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.
Hey if you're interested IBM just developed one such system for the Quebec government (called SAAQClic) that was supposed to cost 638 millions but ended up costing 1.1 billion. We are desperate to monetize it so anything you want to pay to license is fine with us
In inherent to the fact that the US is a federation of States. It does create extra bureaucracy, but the alternative is a unitary state, which the US explicitly avoided in its founding and which most Americans would be opposed to today.
Vehicle registrations are just par for the course.
I don't get how it's constitutional for them to levy a tax on an officer of a company that does not live in the state just because one officer of the company does live in the state. Even weirder the law does not require the one officer that does live in California to have a company car. In other words they are trying to tax out of state cars with no proof those cars were ever in the state. This is gonna cause a mess in the courts.
They only tax the assets that are held in the state. I don't know where you're getting that they will tax out of state cars.
> If anyone running the business is a California resident (by the updated definition outlined above), then the whole business is a California resident, and any assets (including Lamborghinis and Bugattis) held in the state are subject to California taxation.
They're not levying a tax on an officer of the company, they're levying a tax on the company if the company has assets operating in the state. But since a company can't go to jail, the California officers operating the company are on the hook if the company happens to have weirdly empty balance sheets and can't collect what is owed.
I mean, we can continue to pick apart the legal language, or we can acknowledge that if people invent elaborate loopholes to avoid paying taxes, the State will invent elaborate justifications to collect taxes. This is just a cat and mouse game of greed vs. fairness being played out in real-time.
I think the tax hole loop is a bit annoying but I also find it annoying that CA won't allow you to register a shitload of cars in the state, period.
It's due to the asinine carb laws. Even if you have a car that would pass smog, they won't let you register it. I don't see this doing anything when a ton of vehicles get a pass. For instance, all motorcycles don't fall under this rule and they are the biggest polluters out there.
It's just dumb.
All these complaints people have about cars - yet don't see any legislation out there that's bringing the clean energy public transit revolution. Just more rules without any relief.
California is over-regulated and over taxed, "the government knows best, give us all your money and we will take care of you and save the planet". Just leave people alone and let them have a good life and do what they want within reason without trying to suck the life out of every penny.
California's pretty big, possibly too big, and the dense population centers in the Bay Area and SoCal may be dominating state-level politics at the expense of regions with different economic and political interests.
To be fair though before those smog laws pollution in california was terrible. A generation or two living not being able to see the nearby mountains due to the thickness of the smog.
Which seems like a reasonable way to go about it? If you’re in California and taking advantage of the benefits the state offers, you should be contributing towards it?
Have you just now discover what a tax is? It's a means for residents to pay for the government of the state in which they live.
If someone doesn't like California's taxation (or government), they are free to move out of the state, but they can't have it both ways - they don't get to live in California but register assets outside the state to avoid the taxation.
Montana person here. I'm on the other side of this trade: trying to buy cars in California[1] that I'm going to register in Montana. My experience has been that it's very hard to exploit this "loophole". I know that because even not trying to exploit the loophole. I have to jump through hoops to prove to a dealer that I really live in Montana. And then the car has to be either put on a transporter, taken to the border (or all the way to Montana), or driven by an employee of the dealership to the border. Then we have to get paperwork notarized by someone at the border that the vehicle really left CA. You also have to pledge in writing that you wont bring the car back into CA except for maintenance. I've had dealers in LA just plain refuse to sell me a car because I lived in Montana. So it was not in recent years anything like as easy as "put a Montana plate on it" <waves hand>.
The article calls the ownership entities "fake LLCs". They were in fact completely real kosher Montana LLCs. The issue at hand is that CA wants to disallow the case where the LLC is owned by someone who is a CA resident.
That's not the same as "fake".
Finally, anyone from California should experience the Montana DMV (called MDT here). It's like checking into the Four Seasons compared to the CA DMV! You can phone them and they'll answer within a few rings and help you out. You can go down to their office at the court house and perhaps have to wait in line for 5 minutes, but perhaps just walk straight up to the counter. They will help you figure out vanity plate letters, endlessly checking whether ideas you have are already registered. I almost make up excuses to go to the DMV, it's so nice there. Montana also has a system of sponsored plates. There are about 100 of them, which allows you to choose a plate of almost any color, which is nice if you want it to match the car color.
[1] Why do that? Well there are 100X more cars for sale in CA, and the prices are lower.
There seems to be a lot of varied and interesting perspectives and lengthy debates on this thread, but the core issue is California is in debt and needs all the money it can get.
The California DMV is not customer friendly. For example, a lot of Californians don't even know that there is something called PNO, or "planned non-operation", a status possible for vehicles they don't plan to run or use on public streets, where they stop paying recurring registration fees that are now in the hundreds of dollars a year.
Every year, I'm aware of at least a few people who do not have an operational car or have a second car in their garage that they are still paying registration fees for, or the state of California places a lien on their unused vehicle, just because that person is unaware that they can just stop paying registration fees on their car by filing a PNO in time.
First you have to know this PNO status exists, and then you have to file it correctly within a short 90 day window. There are no exceptions, even if you prove you were in a coma or out of state or country. I'm not going to go into the details of how draconian the process of bringing a car out of PNO is. For example, if you have a car that has passed smog in October, you put a PNO in October and you bring it back out of PNO in November, they're going to make you smog it nonetheless - pretty expensive process that costs now atleast a hundred dollars all in, which runs counter to California's own policy of not requiring a smog within 90 days of the recent smog test.
If the DMV was customer facing, they would have by default, placed any cars that have not been registered in time, on PNO. Later, the person who pays the registration then automatically gets their car moved from PNO to registered status.
However, this is not how the DMV operates: They will continue to tax you and fine you and add interest on top of all the fees for a car you do not plan to operate.
So all the debate about whether this is right or if there is another way of doing it etc is missing the entire point because none of that is the objective.
The entire point is to collect taxes and fees to fund a ballooning, unchecked and ever-growing expense account.
Every time you pay your registration in CA (either online or through the mail) they ask if you want to register PNO or not. Also, it’s not free (like $20) to register PNO, so doing it automatically would still result in an unpaid bill.
> The entire point is to collect taxes and fees to fund a ballooning, unchecked and ever-growing expense account.
And the problem with that is that at some point people just vote with their money, their feet and the future wealth they're going to create and GTFO to greener pastures.
There is such a ting as diminishing returns on insane taxation. France is an example. But billionaires leaving California is a thing too.
I did personally decided my native country gave me jack shit in return for my taxes: the only thing it'd give me would be ever more public servants collecting ever more taxes, all the while driving my native city (Brussels / Belgium) into the ground.
So I packed my stuff and left for a country with less taxes and which is, IMO, better managed and where you don't feel like the state's only mission is to turn you into someone poor by seizing all your wealth.
pretty sure in a lot of these cases it’s already illegal, enforcing the law is another matter. someone actually has to pull over the montana plate owner, then the state has to sue them for tax evasion, build the case, etc. Thats just not gonna happen. ideally there would be a nationwide standard for registration and taxes.
also the new hot thing in california is to have dealer plates on your million dollar car. you never register it, never pay taxes, but it’s still legal to drive. you just need to own a dealership, but on paper again that’s not hard if you’re rich
> you just need to own a dealership, but on paper again that’s not hard if you’re rich
You're technically correct, but a dealership is one of the most highly taxed entities in California. In any city or county, a dealership, dollar for dollar, pays one of the highest taxes than any business there.
So this recommendation is similar to stabbing yourself in the stomach so that you weigh less on the scale - there are other details, most people don't care about, with those dealer plates on one's million dollar car that has to do more with insurance, liability and taxes than fees to the CA DMV.
> someone actually has to pull over the montana plate owner, then the state has to sue them for tax evasion, build the case, etc. Thats just not gonna happen
But that's because that's not the path the FTB follows!
The reasonable path that has been taken is the FTB finds out that you, as a Californian, own plates in Montana and send you a bill for the registration plus fees and punitive damages so you reconsider pulling the stunt again. If you don't respond in 90 days, it's sent directly to your bank as a demand letter. If you have at least one bank that has a California domicile, that bank is going to pay out from your funds immediately.
> You're technically correct, but a dealership is one of the most highly taxed entities in California. In any city or county, a dealership, dollar for dollar, pays one of the highest taxes than any business there.
That's true for most dealerships, but most of the taxes are transaction based (probably some for property tax on inventory though). If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes.
Not my style, I just left the state when I was tired of everything. I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts.
> probably some for property tax on inventory though
Most dealerships in the last three decades have not owned their own inventory for a long time. Trade-ins are held by dealerships in a manner very different than just "owning" them outright. These are all financed, leveraged deals.
> If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes
I would imagine you have not worked at a dealership or don't own one, so let's not continue this discussion further because you are severely underestimating what it costs in California (both in time and money) to be a dealer.
> I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts
It's actually great to talk to a transplant because most of my relatives and friends have moved to other states, whereas I've stood steadfast.
Are you happy where you are? What made you be in California? Did you grow up here? Was it for work?
Would you come back if California was split into two, where one part of California was closer politically or regulatory to Texas or Florida?
> I would imagine you have not worked at a dealership or don't own one, so let's not continue this discussion further because you are severely underestimating what it costs in California (both in time and money) to be a dealer.
Fair, but I can't imagine it takes that much time if you don't actually do any transactions or hold any inventory, except for the transactions around the cars you want to drive. I don't know what it costs to be a licensed car dealer that doesn't actually do any transactions, but for a lot of people, it's not really about the money, it's about exploiting loopholes so you can pay something else instead of sales tax on your fancy car.
I was born in Southern California. I went to Milwaukee for college, then came back and got a job in sillycon valley. I'm not going back (except to visit), it's too crowded and I don't like people. Especially in places with weather I like. For roughly twice the price of my small house on a postage stamp lot, I'm on 8 acres with a house that's too big... I did well in the startup lottery, but I can't afford to go to an open house for 8 acres anywhere in California that I'd choose to live.
Caveat: ifn my kiddo establishes himself in California and has kids and would like us closer, we'd probably consider it. He's in high school right now, so that's some time from now. We will want to downsize to a smaller house by then (although probably still don't want to be close to neighbors)
you don't even have to be rich. it's not much more onerous than a generic small business. i know more than one 2-car-inventory dealerships.
but it's only worth the effort if you are rich enough to buy cars that incur substantial tax and reg fees. you still need to have insurance and the dealership kind of insurance costs a lot. you probably aren't going to get umbrella coverage to include it either, so you'll have more limited liability.
It's wild that buying a car dealership that you have no need for other than to avoid taxes is somehow considered more reasonable than just, like, paying the taxes.
These kind of people are bored from already having every material possession they could ever want; so they turn to playing these kind of games to impress their peers.
And the federal government has an 18 cent per gallon excise tax on gas which is used to fund the federal highway trust, which issues grant money for local road construction projects. It's still gas taxes funding the projects, just making a potentially unnecessary round trip through a federal bureaucracy.
this has been my synopsis on tax matters, if you talk about it then it will get changed
so everyone should just pretend that they’re paying sky high taxes and let the broken tax sheltering strategies land poorer people in prison and never talk about the effective ones to anyone except your lawyer
Interesting and somewhat related: Youtuber Cody Detwiler (whistlindiesel) was arrested last year and charged with multiple tax evasion felonies for using the Montana loophole to register his vehicles.
According to Detwiler, Tennessee did not bother to notify him in advance that he was in violation. Instead, they sent heavily armed men to his place of business, handcuffed him, and took him to jail. His bond was $20000.
Detwiler spoke out publicly on his Youtube channel about the arrest, claiming that he was targeted specifically because his celebrity status would bring attention to Tennessee's position on the loophole. Shortly afterward, Detwiler was arrested a second time at the airport while returning from a trip abroad, and charged with a separate Montana loophole violation.
Detwiler says that Tennessee authorities visited his accountant months before he was charged, asked her specific information about his vehicles being registered in Montana, and told her not to let Detwiler know about they were investigating him.
The person in question was arrested and charged with tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return. What he is alleged to have done is illegal.
The state was under no obligation to alert him to the fact that they believed he had committed tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return before they arrested him and charged him with a crime.
What he seems to have expected was an opportunity to pay to settle a criminal charge before it landed him in cuffs. This I should be able to pay to make it go away attitude seems especially prevalent in American society today.
This Montana car registration scheme is, I believe, often referred to as "loophole" not because it's legal but because so many people have been able to get away with it without consequence that it is seen by many as relatively low-risk.
> This I should be able to pay to make it go away attitude seems especially prevalent in American society today.
It works for the billionaire class, why shouldn’t it work for everyone else?
This is what’s ultimately going to kill what’s happening in the US today: when people in power decide that the rule of law is just a suggestion, they’re going to find that there are people willing to use that against them in ways that they’re not going to like.
"Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes."
Gregory v. Helvering, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1935.
Edit: So if it's a legal arrangement that reduces taxes, then yes, it's legal.
TLDR: if the only reason for a transaction is tax avoidance, it may not be "illegal", but it may be disallowed (and presumably incorporated in subsequent legislation).
Similar is "wash sale" legislation: for example, selling a security for a tax loss and
- buying it back within 30 days
- buying a call option on that security.
I will guess that the former might get you just a reassessment (the first time). The latter... well, you're smart enough to know about options and tax-loss sale, now you need to demonstrate that you didn't do it for tax avoidance.
Not sure what US law (federal and gazillion states) has on this.
Setting up the LLC is not illegal. On its own, this is not tax evasion.
The tax evasion comes in when you fail to pay the use tax due and make false declarations or intentionally omit information when you make representations to the government (i.e. in tax filings).
If its just a monetary fine then there’s little reason to arrest somebody to immediately release them when you could’ve just told the accountant he needs to pay a fine or he’s going to be arrested.
Generally-speaking, this type of tax evasion is not treated the same as, say, making a mistake on a tax return that results in you owing a bunch of money to the state.
A quick Google search indicates that willful tax evasion is a Class E felony in Tennessee, with a potential prison term of 1-6 years.
Sounds sensible but I don't think that's actually a law. If doing something via a business legally reduces your tax bill then it is, by definition, legal.
As mentioned in the article, the exception is intended for when the majority of the business is conducted in the other state. If in fact you don't do any business in the other state at all, then you are lying and evading taxes. The law is not about how you set things up on Day 1, it's about whether your ongoing behavior is actually consistent with the requirements of the law.
Fair enough, but that just proves my point: that's a specific law about when you're allowed to do this.
The parent commenter seemed to be saying that if you could reduce your tax burden by putting something through a business then that's illegal even if you've not broken any specific laws.
This is a huge problem with our legal system. Either make the law simple and absolute or don't make it a law. Intent should play absolutely zero role. Otherwise, all you get is a corrupt system of lawfare that interprets the intentionally ambiguous law to suit those in power.
I hit with my car in the night a pedestrian who is spaced out on mescaline and has suicidal tendencies. Vs I hit with my car a neighbor whom I had and have long list of legal disputes and physical confrontations and death threats.
Both hits are the same, resulting damage/death same. Law differentiates on (proven or disproven) intent and resulting sentencing difference may be huge. Or at least should be.
Million other cases proving there are good reasons to take intent into account, even if surface for mistreatment is not small. Unjustice otherwise would be bigger IMHO.
>Either make the law simple and absolute or don't make it a law. I
Government doesn't just give up power like that. And they sure don't give it up over the kicking and screaming of the myriad of industries that benefit as middle men and over the kicking and screaming of the "there ought to be a law" class of useful idiots that exist for every exist of policy.
I used to think this way and then after I got more experience and wisdom I concluded attempting to make simple absolute laws is inflexible and unrealistic.
Yeah but making handy wavy laws that are only enforced when cops and politicians like it inevitably leads to corruption and abuse. Law books 20 feet thick so that everybody is breaking the law at all times and can be basically arrested at will unless you got political connections is super authoritarian.
Just like “regulations are written in blood,” complicated laws and lawyers exist because of all the times when simplistic laws and rules failed to account for edge cases.
To me, "loophole" in a legal context means that the law is written in such a way that there is an omission (perhaps unintentional, though sometimes intentional) such that using that loophole is legal. So yes, using a loophole is -- by definition -- always legal.
If doing something isn't legal, then it's not a loophole. It's just something that someone thought they could get away with if the government didn't notice.
Sounds like this was never legal in Tennessee; calling it a "loophole" isn't correct.
People have called it a loophole because it enables you to get a license plate legally, without paying tax. This enables people to drive down the road without getting pulled over. This part is true, and on day 1, it is completely legal.
However, it is not a loophole for tax obligations you might incur later in your use of the vehicle. If you continue to keep and use that vehicle in another state, that state may require you to register and tax the vehicle there, regardless of your valid MT registration.
Is that true for intentional tax evasion? Certainly I've gotten a letter in the mail when I've messed up my tax return and owed money, because it was a simple mistake. But when it's clear that someone is doing something to intentionally not pay a tax that's owed, I don't think we should expect law enforcement to be polite about it.
The law (at least in California as described in the article) did not permit this behavior. If you didn't actually do the majority of your business in another state then you were illegally evading taxes.
The problem is that this was hard to enforce, so now they have changed the law to something much simpler: if any corporate officer or beneficial owner is a resident of California, then the business is subject to Californian taxation.
The law does not permit the behavior. Tennessee explicitly requires local registration and taxes due on any vehicle owned by a citizen of the state that has spent more than, IIRC, 2 days within the state. They have no income tax so these property taxes are the state's main funding method and they have been increasingly thorough on enforcing it. It is considered willful and intentional tax evasion.
Because, to the chagrin to many a statist in the HN comments, there are all sorts of legal precedents that prevent the .gov from rolling up with a swat team over petty civil violations with no aggrieved party other than the state.
So that I understand correctly: a person broke the law, the legal system used legal methods to deal with it, and he complained because he's a celebrity?
https://xkcd.com/1494/
He didn't break the law. The company was registered in Montana, and he bought the Ferrari in Texas where it was also destroyed in his "durability" test. Why should he pay taxes there? It's not a loophole it's just the law
Neither of us fully understand the entire context of the legal battle, since there is a gag order and neither of us are Cody Detwiler. Certainly though registering luxury vehicles like this under an LLC is common thing to do, and the Cody case is particularly silly because the vehicles were for his company.
It's really not a loophole, it's just how vehicle registration is done. That vehicle never drove into the state of Tennessee and was used for his business, why should it be registered where he lived and not where the company is set up?
And the IRS still requires US Citizens living and working abroad to file tax returns. Tennessee can decide how to tax its residents on their businesses and other assets. "It's just how taxation is done."
Everyone wants to drive their Lambo on the moon with Montana plates thanks to social media clowns, and it has been this way since the blockchain craze of a few years ago.
I wonder if the Montana plates 'loophole' would be as well 'exploited' had it not been for the fictional world of YouTube.
> According to Detwiler, Tennessee did not bother to notify him in advance that he was in violation. Instead, they sent heavily armed men to his place of business, handcuffed him, and took him to jail. His bond was $20000.
Why should white collar crime deserve a lighter touch? This wasn't a no-knock raid in the middle of the night.
Because they’re part of the gentry class white collar, but blue collar crime the police force as we know it today was created to take care of the EastEnders not the Gentry class and the police have been successful in carrying out their remit in that area of law enforcement since the 1840’s/1850’s…
The police are a literal extortion racket in the US. “That’s a nice society you have there, wouldn’t want us to fuck it up would you? No? Better keep paying us then.”
Did he have a history of violence, or was there some good reason to send armed men to his place? If not, this is just a waste of resources, and also adding many armed men into the situation made it more likely for things to turn deadly.
Is there no policy of calling someone without a history of violence (or showing up to inform with no intention of on-the-spot arrest) to let them know they are in violation of the law and request they turn themselves in within the next X days if there is no reason to assume evidence could be destroyed by the person during that time?
Tennessee has specific rules about vehicles that reside within the state for a certain amount of time requiring a local registration and taxes to be paid. This is the law where Cody resides. He willingly and knowingly evaded paying those taxes. Tax evasion is a crime, not a mistake, therefore a polite letter is no more warranted than receiving a polite letter and a chance to return stolen jewels from a jewelry store.
Huh, similar situation in Italy: “Tens of thousands of Italian drivers have purchased Polish number plates for their cars and motorbikes in an elaborate scheme to evade road taxes and pay lower insurance premiums.
An estimated 60,000 motorists — mostly in and around Naples — have been enticed by the promise of 70 per cent savings on road tax and insurance fees to transfer ownership of their vehicles to shell companies in Poland and register the vehicles there, according to an industry group.
Now with Italy’s general election looming, Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition has announced “the elimination” of the unpopular annual road tax that helped spawn the evasion schemes. The bollo auto will be cut for an estimated 14.5mn small and midsized vehicles — a giveaway that will cost Italy’s already strained public coffers an estimated €2.4bn in lost revenue next year” [1].
Paying bollo is not the main reason. Bollo is around 100-200€ a year.
Third Party Insurance for cars is mandatory and in Naples, due to high level of fraud, it can amount to 1500-2000€ a year.
Using a Polish insurance, or a fake Polish insurance, is the main reason to get a Polish license plate.
Luckily the loop hole is being closed by the Polish authorities after it became popular.
This problem is older and existed already before the pandemic, but instead of Polish plates it was German/French, as those countries didn't have such expensive insurance and it was easy to have a foreign branch of a company register one's company car.
The first crackdown was also before the pandemic and being Polish and in-and-out of Italy I fully expected to get caught in the crossfire, but that never happened.
Apparently I was driving too much like a tourist - indicators and all.
That being said a few people from the local Polish community got into trouble, but it always first due to driving into a Zona a Traffico Limitato with a car that shouldn't be there - plates notwithstanding.
I've always found that a bit odd. CA is especially determined to make "any employee's child's dog exists in CA occasionally" a liability for the corresponding business. I'd be quite tempted as a new business owner to make spending more than 9 consecutive days in CA a fireable offense just to avoid these sorts of shenanigans. It's nice that they closed a "loophole," but they opened a bunch of other nonsense in the process.
Drafting gap just moved the loophole: put the car in a Montana trust with an independent Montana trustee that the California beneficiary uses in California.
Requiring registration merely because an out-of-state vehicle spends more time in California than in any other single state raises a serious dormant Commerce Clause problem.
Scheiner specifically emphasized that the interstate registration system avoids requiring a vehicle to pay more than one full registration fee.
Why do you think they made this new law? It gets them to what they actually want, which is collecting tax.
Why not have something reasonable, and pay just the sum for given part of the year? So if vehicle spent 120 days at X, pay (120/365)xSUM, and the other place pays the rest (or X
Y places).
Thats primary school level of math that in 2026 would be trivial yo implement, if fairness is the goal. We have such thing in Switzerland, you dont pay flat yearly fees/taxes/insurances if you register your car in december for example
What most people end up doing is just not registering their car after moving to CA. You will see cars parked in california neighborhoods for years with texas plates where the registration sticker on the windshield is from like 2021. Some cars just running fake paper plates or even no plates at all.
the summary presented by the drive feels like an overreach. but we live in the world of can't have nice things so there you go i guess.
i doubt there's all that many beneficial owners of montana businesses that live in california, but surely there are many nevadans and oregonians that straddle the border and will get unfairly caught up in this.
Washington needs to adopt this policy as well. I have a neighbor who moved 3 houses down a few years ago who brought 4 cars with her from Montana and never registered any of them.
To me at least, the scenario of moving from Montana to Washington, and leaving cars registered to Montana, seems less wrong than the commonly abused loophole.
As I understand, a fairly large number of people register cars in Montana while never living in the state.
Edit: Just to add, maybe the scenario you described should be cracked down on, but it feels like less purposeful avoiding/evading a tax. My opinion is that could come afterwards, with more warning given to people.
When someone first explained the montana loophole, I couldn't believe it was legal, and the consensus at the time was that no, it wasn't actually legal. If you got into an accident, you'd have some difficult explaining to do to your insurance. What the state did here was make it more obvious that people shouldn't be doing this.
The real loophole for normal people is that CA outsources smog checks, there are facebook groups advertising that they will pass your car -- the one without catalytic converters, for example. California is this interesting blend of lawlessness and rule-following, high taxes but also tons of absurdly low taxes (think Prop 13).
Vehicle registration and taxation is one of those things that made sense on a state level back when economies were more regional and auto travel wasn’t so ubiquitous. Now that both are no longer true, a patchwork system of 50+ different schemes makes it trivial to exploit loopholes.
This is one of those functions best handled at a national level and dispersed proportionally back to the states based on population relative to total registrations. It doesn’t have to mean the end of local or vanity plates (those could still persist with local DMVs functioning as federal tax collecting agents), but moving to a national or international scheme makes increasing sense.
My CA registration was going to be around $2k. Then I moved to Florida. $40 including the $2.95 credit card fee and $1 mail it to me instead of pickup. Sanity is possible in registrations, CA is just greedy, corrupt, and led by fuckwads.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] threadIs dumb.
You want comprehensive enforcement with reasonable penalities.
You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.
- Pollution
- Noise
Regardless of the source. If someone comes up with a magic silent gas leaf blower which doesn't pollute, that's okay.
But gas leaf blowers are easily replaced by a much less neighbor-hostile alternative.
"We have a permit."
It costs around $200 at City Hall to pick up a permit.
I told him I appreciate the crew coming out and fixing it right away.
The ban is useless because the only way to enforce it is to catch it in the act (in my town). Basically impossible. So it is a ban that could be enforced (other ways) but instead is just a suggestion - and not one that most people follow because there are almost no repercussions.
> You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.
This depends entirely on what the goal of the law is.
Details are important and very hard to get right.
I'm relying on the paraphrasing in article rather than the text of the law itself, but this says that it only applies to assets held in the state.
As long as nothing about this crosses state lines (ie they’re not trying to regulate out of state businesses or property) there’s not a lot to go on. Several states have taken similar steps to close this loophole. Famously the YouTuber whistlindiesel got arrested in Tennessee for this and the case is still pending
https://www.thedrive.com/news/is-the-government-making-an-ex...
Did you even read what was written?
(surprised pikachu face)
Paying tax on a vehicle driven in a state is not unreasonable. And holding the executives of a shell/numbered/privately-held/tax-dodging organization liable for taxes owed is not draconian.
These shenanigans with vehicle taxes happen whenever a neighboring state has a significantly better deal. People register vehicles in friends or families names who live in that state, or form a legal entity there which can own the vehicles. Of course then the high-tax state writes more and more convoluted definitions of "residency" for the vehicle to make it subject to taxation, which are either hard to discover/enforce as a practical matter or someone finds a new loophole and the avoidance games continue.
Good! I do not understand why people think this is a bad thing. I would rather be surrounded by poor, kind people than these rich sociopaths.
Now comments like this, defending losers with lambos, are seen as admirable.
I don't know where you heard this, but it is not true. HN is filled with people with many opinions about the rich, and also many rich people, and has always been.
Startup News, created by a founder of the venture capital incubator Y Combinator, did not ever uniformly hate the rich. It is sponsored by the extremely rich, and only exists because they wished it into existence and maintain it.
By what definition is someone with things you don't have a "loser"?
The people who relocate to avoid taxes are upper-middle class people who are overextended on their finances.
...While 99% of road damage is being done by out-of-state semi trucks exempt from CA registration.
Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
> Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
There isn’t one, nor was there ever. You always had to pay CA sales tax on cars that were primarily used in CA.
The majority of people who did the Montana “loophole” in California were always overextended yahoos trying to save 40k to look richer than they are. It was always illegal to do in CA. This was the kind of shit YouTubers and dentists who “know a guy” did
Our willingness as a society to tolerate the expense, danger, and health issues brought by extensive car use will be looked back on with bewilderment. You can start to see the insanity when a 'classic' car drives by. It's noisy, heavy, dangerous, and smelly. It's allowed to noticeably pollute any area it passes through. We've made progress, but that level of noise, danger, and pollution is how every car on your street used to be.
Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.
Our government created a vast, expensive, open to use resource in roads and infrastructure, offers minimal restrictions an licensing for its use, barely enforces existing safety laws, and the combustion crowd shows outrage at the loss of their illegal activities.
I wish our culture was less tolerant of this behavior. It is a tiny percentage that costs the rest of us constantly. Sometimes its a motorcycle club, others it just rich people shucking the social contract. I'm looking forward to the last Harley getting recycled.
I'm a newcomer to this hobby, and am amazed how this resentment has perpetuated since their muscle cars were neutered in the 70's by emissions regulations. The resentment has transferred to subsequent generations who were not alive then, who still complain about all the emissions and efficiency efforts that carmakers undertake. Too much unnecessary machismo hanging around.
There's artistic merit in historic industrial design & engineering, and keeping those things in an operational state; for which I am willing to tolerate the occasional puff of blue smoke.
Here was my summer vacation this year — good luck with that lmfao https://i.ibb.co/5XxDvbyK/Emi-2026-10-06-18-12-00.png
In exchange, consider extending that same optionality to others whose preferences are different from your own.
Dream on. It'll never happen.
Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..
The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.
Coming from $300/yr colorado insurance its a steal
I'm full time in a camper right now so this entire conversation is extra fun because I don't have a physical address anywhere which is a whole other ball of worms just insuring and registering my truck.
I wish you could just register under an LLC or trust or something wherever and have a generic plate that can go anywhere and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country.
Alternatively allow people to keep their plates indefinitely like phone numbers. Yes, this creates arbitrage opportunities but maybe we should be bringing up the standards of the arbitrage states instead of having assholes threaten everyone with guns for random infractions.
Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2024-sta...
That said, I've moved across state lines before and didn't find it that inconvenient. I just had to re-register and do a smog check.
The US Supreme Court recognizes a general principle that you can transit a State with things that are illegal in that State. An individual State cannot impose a de facto ban on commerce between States, which includes the right to transport goods through a State in the normal fashion regardless of the laws of that State.
The court viewed this as unconstitutional interference in the commerce between the origin and destination States, which seems correct on its face. There must be evidence of intent to distribute the firearms in the State where they are illegal. This case created a safe harbor for mere transport of goods between States.
Cannabis is different because it violates Federal law. It is technically illegal everywhere even though it is legal under State law in many locales. The Federal government has chosen to not enforce this law in States where it is legal, largely because enforcement could create a Constitutional case that could bring into question Federal authority to enact those and many other laws.
If you go by the spirit of the law, then a grace period would be reasonable to apply to infrequent visitors. However, you travel there daily, so that does not apply and you are violating the spirit of the law.
Either way, you're wrong.
If your argument for this law is that it forces people to incriminate themselves, that's really an argument that the whole thing should be thrown out.
Under no circumstances should you be able to be compelled to assist in your own prosecution, either directly or indirectly.
That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
Your position boils down to: "I should be able to commit traffic violations anonymously because anything else is an infringement on my 5th amendment rights".
Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
You are requiring someone to take action that will assist in their own prosecution. That is the goal as per your own statements, and is the obvious primary purpose of these laws.
If that is not compelling someone to self-incriminate, what is?
>Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
No, i'm saying that if you make a law whose primary purpose is to assist in the prosection of those who are compelled to follow it, that law is invalid. If you make a law that incidentally requires someone to assist in their own prosecution, then the law may be valid, but the usage of that information in prosecution or investigations is invalid and falls under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
I see no difference between it and compelling people in court to testify against themselves, because the only difference is where the self-incrimination is happening.
Idk about the rest of the country, but in my experience in the southern US it's a pretty common tactic to pull you over for assumed illegal tint to try and catch you for other charges. Especially if you aren't white.
There are all sorts of laws that apply in one place but not others. Why do you think tint or vehicles should get special treatment?
If I buy legal weed in Colorado and take it into Utah, it doesn’t matter that I’m not an Utah resident, and that the weed is legal where I bought it.
For example: The tint that Florida law allows is way, way darker than what Ohio law allows.
But the Ohio Revised Code has carveouts that make it perfectly legal for Florida Man to drive his darker-tinted Florida-registered car in Ohio.
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... when I registered my out-of-state Model 3
There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.
It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.
What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?
And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.
The whole edifice is absurd.
Actually a very sensible proposition.
Do you wear a name tag in public with your SSN, or some unique identifying information on it? If not, why not?
If I asked you to vote on this, would you vote in favor for it?
Why not? People can strangle other people so it makes sense to know who is who at all times in the case that someone strangles someone else and then tries to run away.
If this isn't making sense yet - This is as sensible as expecting software engineers to walk around with equipment that prominently display uniquely identifying information because computers can be used to hack and doxx people.
The fact that license plates were/are necessary is to address shortcomings of technology.
Most states in 2026 are slowly removing the need to display license plates at all because it never made sense but had to be done to address shortcomings that are no longer so in 2026.
Do you have a reference? I have not read this, and California is going the opposite way.
It's the qualitative change than comes with the change in quantity of monitoring that means being identifiable is so much worse now days.
You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.
Do I have a right to feed myself and my family?
If yes, is that right absolute or relative?
If absolute, and my ability to feed requires me to commute in a car, is having a car a right or a privilege?
But hey, I'm sure you're the first to vote against any measures that would actually improve things like urban density or public transportation.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...
And nobody said anything about wanting to be unaccountable for harm. Rather it's a matter of being vulnerable to ne'er do wells. When we get a US GDPR equivalent with teeth, develop a widespread societal taboo against the surveillance industries, and so on, then we can talk about an equitable tradeoff with accountability for harm. Until then, the dynamic is an overwhelming vulnerability.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
The specific harms are exemplified by things like Flock, but also individual businesses tracking, private investigators, etc. If you want to stop that harm other ways, I've already agreed that I would find that acceptable. But until something actually changes on that front, it's not really an argument!
Given modern technology, we can imagine different ways that would provide less of a general vulnerability while actually providing more of the accountability you're putting foremost. Imagine say e-ink plates or a radio beacon that rotated the broadcasted identifier every minute, only being linkable through a database with an audit trail, etc.
Tell that to felons. Or people with diagnosed mental health issues of certain types.
The idea of a "right" is hilarious. Whenever you have an entity (like a government) that has the power of force or imprisonment over you, everything is a privilege.
I can't think of very many "rights" that haven't been abridged, curtailed, or violated by governments in ways that have been held to be legal when reviewed by courts.
That's just the US being stupid and using driver's licenses as primary identity documents. (And if you don't have a passport or other ID document, you're part of that problem.)
(Fun fact: I have 2 passports, 1 driver's license and 1 residence permit. None of those have my address. To be fair, they all have my DOB, that's really considered mandatory for any ID document around here.)
A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.
Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.
The requirement to identify the vehicle for enforcement of the licensing requirements is not at all strange.
Don't get a license if you don't agree with the requirements for it. Would you be saying the same thing for aircraft?
I think the only reason we enforce showing the plates is so the police can easily see if a vehicle is allowed to be on the roads from their own vehicles during traffic stops. We don't have police out patrolling for gun owners, but if we did I bet we would see more public "gun registration plates" for convenience purposes.
As for drivers licenses at bars, again, it's just convenience. We could split all that info into separate little cards and only show what we need to, but we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
That's not "low risk"; that actually happens, a lot. Many bars and supermarkets will scan the barcode on the back of your license when they do the check. Of course everything on it goes into a database to help build a profile about you.
I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.
To rephrase, you're asking that the same license plate work across all of the European Union.
To realize why this is unrealistic, one has to go back to history and understand the core concept of the United States of America. It's right there in the name itself. It was a compromise to unite and bring agreement across all these disparate states that were in their very own right entire countries (and most, even till date, most states in the US continue to be larger, geographically than most countries in the world), agree on some very basic terms so there could be trade across them, kind of like the European Union.
> but this current system is Kafkaesque
Of course, this license plate registration thing was optimized for tax and fee collection, and it does that job very well. All it takes is for someone to run for office and say they're going to overturn it all.
VAT I guess being the interesting part given the original topic.
It would be nice though, if you could just buy a car across the border and drive it home. I doubt the EU will ever be that integrated.
You lost me in the next paragraph where your solution was to centralize even more into a committee that has the power to bulldoze over more locally relevant needs and desires
this is a very local need of some people. they are a minority, and they want some accomodations.
Except no one would buy it, not even Carmax or any of the other "cash for cars" places! Turns out, the car was originally manufactured for Canada, and California doesn't recognize the Canadian smog regulations, even if the car was functionally identical down to the catalytic converter. No one would take the damn thing because they couldn't re-title it. I finally found one guy who would who seemed like he was taking a decent sized risk, but since I gave him a good price he decided he'd just give it his best shot. For all I know he may have had to (illegally) drive it to Nevada just to sell it.
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
It's kinda same in California. A license plate is assigned to the car, unlike some other states. Note that the US is nominally a federation of sovereign states, most especially when it comes to property and taxation law. In this context, California : US :: France : EU.
I mean you do have to live close to a (tri-)state border to pull this off, but it’s probably doable.
As a reminder, we’re talking about a (hypothetical) 183-day rule for car registration here (as opposed to the ~30-day one we currently have, which makes loopholes that we discuss here absolutely impractical).
The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.
We don't call fake IDs either a loophole or "ghost IDs". When presented as identity documents, they're fraudulent identity documents. It doesn't matter if that ID is being presented to a bouncer in order to get in to a bar, or to everyone who cares to look at your car's bumper while it drives down the motorway, it's still a fake ID.
Only these are "ghost plates". So called because the letters appear faint, or ghost like, on ANPR cameras.
Using illegal plates, either ghost ones or cloned ones (where they're real plates but for the wrong vehicle) are not loopholes, any more than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff is a "loophole" for property ownership.
Pretty sure that's illegal, no? You have 30 days after bringing a car into the state to register it with the CA DMV.
It’s not 30 days it’s 20 but it isn’t “bringing into the state”, it is becoming a resident of the state, and that has more requirements than just showing up for a month.
Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.
It's mostly a voluntary standard for convenience. You can still get 5.5" x 9.5" plates in Delaware.
Vehicle registrations are just par for the course.
You and I both benefit from having fire departments even if our possessions never ignite. The same is true for all sorts of common infrastructure.
> If anyone running the business is a California resident (by the updated definition outlined above), then the whole business is a California resident, and any assets (including Lamborghinis and Bugattis) held in the state are subject to California taxation.
I mean, we can continue to pick apart the legal language, or we can acknowledge that if people invent elaborate loopholes to avoid paying taxes, the State will invent elaborate justifications to collect taxes. This is just a cat and mouse game of greed vs. fairness being played out in real-time.
It's due to the asinine carb laws. Even if you have a car that would pass smog, they won't let you register it. I don't see this doing anything when a ton of vehicles get a pass. For instance, all motorcycles don't fall under this rule and they are the biggest polluters out there.
It's just dumb.
All these complaints people have about cars - yet don't see any legislation out there that's bringing the clean energy public transit revolution. Just more rules without any relief.
Yeah this is kind of explicitly what most people living there seem to want
If someone doesn't like California's taxation (or government), they are free to move out of the state, but they can't have it both ways - they don't get to live in California but register assets outside the state to avoid the taxation.
The article calls the ownership entities "fake LLCs". They were in fact completely real kosher Montana LLCs. The issue at hand is that CA wants to disallow the case where the LLC is owned by someone who is a CA resident. That's not the same as "fake".
Finally, anyone from California should experience the Montana DMV (called MDT here). It's like checking into the Four Seasons compared to the CA DMV! You can phone them and they'll answer within a few rings and help you out. You can go down to their office at the court house and perhaps have to wait in line for 5 minutes, but perhaps just walk straight up to the counter. They will help you figure out vanity plate letters, endlessly checking whether ideas you have are already registered. I almost make up excuses to go to the DMV, it's so nice there. Montana also has a system of sponsored plates. There are about 100 of them, which allows you to choose a plate of almost any color, which is nice if you want it to match the car color.
[1] Why do that? Well there are 100X more cars for sale in CA, and the prices are lower.
On what? Genuinely curious what class of vehicle you’re buying and selling. I’m assuming it’s…not Camrys.
The California DMV is not customer friendly. For example, a lot of Californians don't even know that there is something called PNO, or "planned non-operation", a status possible for vehicles they don't plan to run or use on public streets, where they stop paying recurring registration fees that are now in the hundreds of dollars a year.
Every year, I'm aware of at least a few people who do not have an operational car or have a second car in their garage that they are still paying registration fees for, or the state of California places a lien on their unused vehicle, just because that person is unaware that they can just stop paying registration fees on their car by filing a PNO in time.
First you have to know this PNO status exists, and then you have to file it correctly within a short 90 day window. There are no exceptions, even if you prove you were in a coma or out of state or country. I'm not going to go into the details of how draconian the process of bringing a car out of PNO is. For example, if you have a car that has passed smog in October, you put a PNO in October and you bring it back out of PNO in November, they're going to make you smog it nonetheless - pretty expensive process that costs now atleast a hundred dollars all in, which runs counter to California's own policy of not requiring a smog within 90 days of the recent smog test.
If the DMV was customer facing, they would have by default, placed any cars that have not been registered in time, on PNO. Later, the person who pays the registration then automatically gets their car moved from PNO to registered status.
However, this is not how the DMV operates: They will continue to tax you and fine you and add interest on top of all the fees for a car you do not plan to operate.
So all the debate about whether this is right or if there is another way of doing it etc is missing the entire point because none of that is the objective.
The entire point is to collect taxes and fees to fund a ballooning, unchecked and ever-growing expense account.
And the problem with that is that at some point people just vote with their money, their feet and the future wealth they're going to create and GTFO to greener pastures.
There is such a ting as diminishing returns on insane taxation. France is an example. But billionaires leaving California is a thing too.
I did personally decided my native country gave me jack shit in return for my taxes: the only thing it'd give me would be ever more public servants collecting ever more taxes, all the while driving my native city (Brussels / Belgium) into the ground.
So I packed my stuff and left for a country with less taxes and which is, IMO, better managed and where you don't feel like the state's only mission is to turn you into someone poor by seizing all your wealth.
also the new hot thing in california is to have dealer plates on your million dollar car. you never register it, never pay taxes, but it’s still legal to drive. you just need to own a dealership, but on paper again that’s not hard if you’re rich
You're technically correct, but a dealership is one of the most highly taxed entities in California. In any city or county, a dealership, dollar for dollar, pays one of the highest taxes than any business there.
So this recommendation is similar to stabbing yourself in the stomach so that you weigh less on the scale - there are other details, most people don't care about, with those dealer plates on one's million dollar car that has to do more with insurance, liability and taxes than fees to the CA DMV.
> someone actually has to pull over the montana plate owner, then the state has to sue them for tax evasion, build the case, etc. Thats just not gonna happen
But that's because that's not the path the FTB follows!
The reasonable path that has been taken is the FTB finds out that you, as a Californian, own plates in Montana and send you a bill for the registration plus fees and punitive damages so you reconsider pulling the stunt again. If you don't respond in 90 days, it's sent directly to your bank as a demand letter. If you have at least one bank that has a California domicile, that bank is going to pay out from your funds immediately.
That's true for most dealerships, but most of the taxes are transaction based (probably some for property tax on inventory though). If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes.
Not my style, I just left the state when I was tired of everything. I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts.
Most dealerships in the last three decades have not owned their own inventory for a long time. Trade-ins are held by dealerships in a manner very different than just "owning" them outright. These are all financed, leveraged deals.
> If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes
I would imagine you have not worked at a dealership or don't own one, so let's not continue this discussion further because you are severely underestimating what it costs in California (both in time and money) to be a dealer.
> I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts
It's actually great to talk to a transplant because most of my relatives and friends have moved to other states, whereas I've stood steadfast.
Are you happy where you are? What made you be in California? Did you grow up here? Was it for work?
Would you come back if California was split into two, where one part of California was closer politically or regulatory to Texas or Florida?
Fair, but I can't imagine it takes that much time if you don't actually do any transactions or hold any inventory, except for the transactions around the cars you want to drive. I don't know what it costs to be a licensed car dealer that doesn't actually do any transactions, but for a lot of people, it's not really about the money, it's about exploiting loopholes so you can pay something else instead of sales tax on your fancy car.
I was born in Southern California. I went to Milwaukee for college, then came back and got a job in sillycon valley. I'm not going back (except to visit), it's too crowded and I don't like people. Especially in places with weather I like. For roughly twice the price of my small house on a postage stamp lot, I'm on 8 acres with a house that's too big... I did well in the startup lottery, but I can't afford to go to an open house for 8 acres anywhere in California that I'd choose to live.
Caveat: ifn my kiddo establishes himself in California and has kids and would like us closer, we'd probably consider it. He's in high school right now, so that's some time from now. We will want to downsize to a smaller house by then (although probably still don't want to be close to neighbors)
because the ftb literally doesn’t handle car sales tax, that’s a different department. ftb just does corporate and income tax
https://www.californiadealeracademy.com/articles/the-importa...
but it's only worth the effort if you are rich enough to buy cars that incur substantial tax and reg fees. you still need to have insurance and the dealership kind of insurance costs a lot. you probably aren't going to get umbrella coverage to include it either, so you'll have more limited liability.
Also, please consider this is just for registering the vehicle, gas taxes actually pay for road use.
No, a significant chunk comes from the general fund and the federal government.
so everyone should just pretend that they’re paying sky high taxes and let the broken tax sheltering strategies land poorer people in prison and never talk about the effective ones to anyone except your lawyer
According to Detwiler, Tennessee did not bother to notify him in advance that he was in violation. Instead, they sent heavily armed men to his place of business, handcuffed him, and took him to jail. His bond was $20000.
Detwiler spoke out publicly on his Youtube channel about the arrest, claiming that he was targeted specifically because his celebrity status would bring attention to Tennessee's position on the loophole. Shortly afterward, Detwiler was arrested a second time at the airport while returning from a trip abroad, and charged with a separate Montana loophole violation.
Detwiler says that Tennessee authorities visited his accountant months before he was charged, asked her specific information about his vehicles being registered in Montana, and told her not to let Detwiler know about they were investigating him.
Why would they? The people who use these "loopholes" know exactly what they're doing.
The person in question was arrested and charged with tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return. What he is alleged to have done is illegal.
The state was under no obligation to alert him to the fact that they believed he had committed tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return before they arrested him and charged him with a crime.
What he seems to have expected was an opportunity to pay to settle a criminal charge before it landed him in cuffs. This I should be able to pay to make it go away attitude seems especially prevalent in American society today.
This Montana car registration scheme is, I believe, often referred to as "loophole" not because it's legal but because so many people have been able to get away with it without consequence that it is seen by many as relatively low-risk.
It works for the billionaire class, why shouldn’t it work for everyone else?
This is what’s ultimately going to kill what’s happening in the US today: when people in power decide that the rule of law is just a suggestion, they’re going to find that there are people willing to use that against them in ways that they’re not going to like.
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club...and you ain't in it!"
When it comes to financial crime, billionaires get benefits, plebs get prison.
Gregory v. Helvering, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1935.
Edit: So if it's a legal arrangement that reduces taxes, then yes, it's legal.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...
TLDR: if the only reason for a transaction is tax avoidance, it may not be "illegal", but it may be disallowed (and presumably incorporated in subsequent legislation).
Similar is "wash sale" legislation: for example, selling a security for a tax loss and
- buying it back within 30 days
- buying a call option on that security.
I will guess that the former might get you just a reassessment (the first time). The latter... well, you're smart enough to know about options and tax-loss sale, now you need to demonstrate that you didn't do it for tax avoidance.
Not sure what US law (federal and gazillion states) has on this.
The tax evasion comes in when you fail to pay the use tax due and make false declarations or intentionally omit information when you make representations to the government (i.e. in tax filings).
If its just a monetary fine then there’s little reason to arrest somebody to immediately release them when you could’ve just told the accountant he needs to pay a fine or he’s going to be arrested.
A quick Google search indicates that willful tax evasion is a Class E felony in Tennessee, with a potential prison term of 1-6 years.
The parent commenter seemed to be saying that if you could reduce your tax burden by putting something through a business then that's illegal even if you've not broken any specific laws.
Both hits are the same, resulting damage/death same. Law differentiates on (proven or disproven) intent and resulting sentencing difference may be huge. Or at least should be.
Million other cases proving there are good reasons to take intent into account, even if surface for mistreatment is not small. Unjustice otherwise would be bigger IMHO.
The world isn't simple and absolute, and the law isn't a computer program.
Government doesn't just give up power like that. And they sure don't give it up over the kicking and screaming of the myriad of industries that benefit as middle men and over the kicking and screaming of the "there ought to be a law" class of useful idiots that exist for every exist of policy.
You cannot reasonably create a law that covers all situations in their entirety. Even if you could, it would become obsolete the second it's in effect
When it comes to law, "simple" and "absolute" are basically mutually exclusive.
If the law is written simply, then lawyers will pick apart even the slightest ambiguity and the spirit of the law becomes irrelevant.
If the law is absolute, then it becomes verbose in order to close the loopholes.
If doing something isn't legal, then it's not a loophole. It's just something that someone thought they could get away with if the government didn't notice.
Sounds like this was never legal in Tennessee; calling it a "loophole" isn't correct.
However, it is not a loophole for tax obligations you might incur later in your use of the vehicle. If you continue to keep and use that vehicle in another state, that state may require you to register and tax the vehicle there, regardless of your valid MT registration.
The law permits the behaviour, don’t like it? Change it.
The problem is that this was hard to enforce, so now they have changed the law to something much simpler: if any corporate officer or beneficial owner is a resident of California, then the business is subject to Californian taxation.
I wonder if the Montana plates 'loophole' would be as well 'exploited' had it not been for the fictional world of YouTube.
Why should white collar crime deserve a lighter touch? This wasn't a no-knock raid in the middle of the night.
This is the deal at this point.
An estimated 60,000 motorists — mostly in and around Naples — have been enticed by the promise of 70 per cent savings on road tax and insurance fees to transfer ownership of their vehicles to shell companies in Poland and register the vehicles there, according to an industry group.
Now with Italy’s general election looming, Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition has announced “the elimination” of the unpopular annual road tax that helped spawn the evasion schemes. The bollo auto will be cut for an estimated 14.5mn small and midsized vehicles — a giveaway that will cost Italy’s already strained public coffers an estimated €2.4bn in lost revenue next year” [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/74e70f0c-3788-4343-93d7-9c8740ee2...
Luckily the loop hole is being closed by the Polish authorities after it became popular.
That's a crazy amount of money for a third-party liability insurance.. It looks like insurance cartels are having a field day..
The first crackdown was also before the pandemic and being Polish and in-and-out of Italy I fully expected to get caught in the crossfire, but that never happened.
Apparently I was driving too much like a tourist - indicators and all.
That being said a few people from the local Polish community got into trouble, but it always first due to driving into a Zona a Traffico Limitato with a car that shouldn't be there - plates notwithstanding.
Why is the insurance priced off plate versus the car's location? Is a unified car-insurance market on the EU roadmap?
Scheiner specifically emphasized that the interstate registration system avoids requiring a vehicle to pay more than one full registration fee.
Why do you think they made this new law? It gets them to what they actually want, which is collecting tax.
Thats primary school level of math that in 2026 would be trivial yo implement, if fairness is the goal. We have such thing in Switzerland, you dont pay flat yearly fees/taxes/insurances if you register your car in december for example
i doubt there's all that many beneficial owners of montana businesses that live in california, but surely there are many nevadans and oregonians that straddle the border and will get unfairly caught up in this.
It's... ridiculous.
As I understand, a fairly large number of people register cars in Montana while never living in the state.
Edit: Just to add, maybe the scenario you described should be cracked down on, but it feels like less purposeful avoiding/evading a tax. My opinion is that could come afterwards, with more warning given to people.
The real loophole for normal people is that CA outsources smog checks, there are facebook groups advertising that they will pass your car -- the one without catalytic converters, for example. California is this interesting blend of lawlessness and rule-following, high taxes but also tons of absurdly low taxes (think Prop 13).
This is one of those functions best handled at a national level and dispersed proportionally back to the states based on population relative to total registrations. It doesn’t have to mean the end of local or vanity plates (those could still persist with local DMVs functioning as federal tax collecting agents), but moving to a national or international scheme makes increasing sense.