Are you kidding me you have to pay an annual tax on your car ? This is on top of your sticker ?
No kidding. In addition to paying four percent sales tax at the time of purchase, plus a reoccurring annual tax based upon the value of the vehicle, which before adjustment is 4.57%, we also pay a $25 per year decal fee. Welcome to Socialist Virginia.
When the annual car tax was first introduced in Virginia, the voters went nuts and elected a governor who promised to immediately repeal it. Once in office, however, the liar showed his true colors and merely offered a deduction in the taxes owed on the lower-end of a car’s value (and even that took years to implement). The result has been two-fold. First, each car tax bill comes with three figures: the amount of taxed assessed at 4.57% (which scares the hell out of most people), the amount the Virginia government has, in all its benevolent generosity, determined to forego (the so-called "relief," which is to make us abused tax payers feel lucky I guess), and the amount you still owe after such relief. Second, because the so-called "relief" is applied on the lower end of value, most of the voters are now sufficiently pacified, while a minority of us who work our butts off to purchase a high-end car, have to pay a grossly disproportionate percentage of the car tax. Look at two of my cars for example. My '98 Camry is valued by Virginia around $7.5K and I owe about a $100 in car tax on it. My '04 Viper on the other hand is valued at around ten times that of the Camry, but the taxes I owe on it are around THIRTY times that which I owe on the Camry, or about $3,000!
JWVIPER -- Real property tax in my county, Fairfax, is 1.13% of assessed value, but at least it applies to everyone equally. Fairfax also adds one percent to the state's 4% sales tax. And yes, we also pay income tax in Virginia.
Virginia is tax payer hell.
Again, sorry for the rant. Venting helps.
