Heads, You Pay the Tax. Tails, You Pay the Fee.

Nobody charging you a fee thinks their fee is the problem.

The cable company sees one broadcast fee. The hotel sees one resort fee. The airline sees one baggage fee. Each government agency sees one tax, surcharge or assessment attached to one worthy purpose.

You’re the only person who sees the entire bill.

That’s the problem.

Oakridge, Oregon, needs an ambulance service.

The small city sits roughly 45 minutes from Eugene. City officials say relying on ambulances from outside the area could add an hour—or more—to emergency response times. In some cases, that could mean the difference between life and death.

The service also runs an annual deficit approaching $500,000.

That’s a real problem.

So Oakridge did what private companies have perfected: It created a fee.

That’s right. Government has fully embraced the fee game.

Americans already know how it works. The advertised price of almost everything connected to our homes, phones and daily lives is merely the starting point. Cable bills come with broadcast television fees. Cellphone bills include administrative and regulatory-recovery fees. Hotels add resort fees. Airlines charge for bags, seats and nearly everything short of breathing onboard.

Taxes are controversial.

Fees? Eh, not so much.

A fee sounds like an explanation. It appears limited to a specific need. Most sound necessary. Few seem large enough to fight individually.

That’s what makes them effective.

Oakridge residents now pay a $17 monthly “ambulance service utility fee” through their water bills.

Yes, their water bills.

Seventeen dollars a month doesn’t sound like much. But $204 a year sounds different, doesn’t it?

The City Council imposed the fee without voter approval.

To be fair, Oakridge plans to place a property-tax levy before voters that would replace it. But according to local reporting, if voters reject the tax, the existing fee will remain.

Think about that.

Residents can approve the tax—or continue paying the fee imposed without their approval.

That isn’t much of a choice.

Again, ambulance service requires funding. It plainly matters. Whether government should be able to avoid asking voters by attaching a mandatory charge to an unrelated bill and calling it something other than a tax is a legitimate question.

But the larger problem is that everyone imposing these charges considers only the justification for their own.

The city sees $17 for an ambulance. The state sees a few more cents for roads. The federal government sees another percentage point for a national program. The utility authority sees a surcharge. The school district sees a levy.

Every one of them can explain why its charge is necessary.

Nobody is responsible for asking what all those individually reasonable charges become when added together.

Government needs money. That’s obvious.

But what about the people earning it?

Before Oakridge created another charge, did it examine every possible spending cut? Did it eliminate lower priorities? Did it demonstrate that charging every household another $204 a year was truly the last available option?

Maybe it did. The public deserves to see the evidence.

Government reaches for “revenue generation” reflexively. Spending reductions are treated as extraordinary, painful and nearly unthinkable.

But every dollar government doesn’t spend is one dollar it doesn’t need to tax, assess, surcharge or quietly attach to the water bill.

Oakridge sees a $500,000 deficit being addressed.

The family paying the bill sees something else:

Another fee.