We can’t visit every stupid progressive bill; there are too many. When they catch our eye, or one of our readers brings them to our attention, we can at least take a look. It’s not always a good look, but with any luck, we’ll get some feedback on it like HB120.
This legislation crams the art of tattoo, body piercing or branding under the Granite State’s crowded umbrella of professional licensure and certification. For a State with a Live Free or Die nickname, we regulate the crap out of occupations. Some of the most mundane professions are required to dump a small fortune in time, cash, and training to appease their regulatory overlords. Just to run a business.
Hair braiding recently got cut loose from that plantation. A rare event. Before that, if you wanted to sell braiding services, you had to bow and scrape before the state licensure board. Pay for your training and your license and so on. To braid hair.
Tattoos Too?
Now that everyone (except me, and maybe you) has a tattoo, the state can’t stand to skip out on an opportunity to regulate them. To do that we have HB120. A Bill that requires practitioners and apprentices of body art to each pay a 110.00 dollar fee every two years to the state. Or else!
Disregarding unlicensed black-market body artists getting nabbed and fined the state estimates these fees will net 12,100 dollars a year.
To regulate, manage, and enforce this new law the taxpayer must provide equipment, office space, salary and benefits to an inspector. This will cost $103,000 the first year (25k of that is for a vehicle), and then 80k+ each successive year (salary costs, etc.) for the position on an escalating scale because government overreach never costs less in successive years.
The math never has a chance not that this was ever the intention.
Where’s the Fire?
I know nothing about the “body art” business, but I do know that corrosive government interference hurts small business owners, their employees, and their customers. So, I can only assume we’ve had a wave of faulty tattoo and piercing incidents over which the general populace is outraged. We need inspections! Oversight. A licensing fee!
Why else regulate it?
I guess I’m missing something. If this bill is the smoke where is the fire?