You may think or convinced yourself it's legal, but I highly doubt it is. Definitely unethical.
Correct. The “sales” tax as commonly referred, is more precisely called a sales and use tax. The laws are typically worded such once you establish residency, you have nn number of days to register your vehicles in the state. All of them have various mechanisms to enforce compliance.
So is confiscation of wealth once the electorate spends beyond its means and unrepresentative of its constitutes that employ them.
The electorate keeps sending the confiscators back to office to write more laws, so it’s not unrepresentative.
It's a game. The game has rules. The rules are called laws. The umpires are called judges. The rules are made by unethical scumbags influenced by unethical industry to benefit themselves.
THIS. Edit to add: The rules are also enforced by unethical scumbags, which creates a self sustaining ecosystem of unethical scumbags.
If you're fortunate enough to be in a position to use a rule to your advantage, why not?
The consequences of getting caught.
Decades ago, I got into a long running battle with MD motive vehicle association. It started when I cancelled insurance on one of my cars, only the agent cancelled my policy entirely, so for about 20 days, I had no insurance, which they happily notified MVA of. At the time, that was a 200 dollar fine + 5 dollars per day over 30 days in perpetuity - with no cap.
As soon as I got the check I called and asked WTH, and got insured, but, that landed me on MD’s “prove you have insurance list” - which wasn’t supposed to exist, so every few months I’d have to get forms from an insurance agent showing coverage, which got complicated once I bought and sold a bunch of cars. I had to do this once and the guy in front of me was rather obviously dirt poor.
Dude was trying to register a 70’s Dodge Dart Swinger he paid $200 for. Only he’d racked up $1700 in compulsory insurance violation fines. He could not register a vehicle or renew his license until the fine was satisfied. Not sure what he ended up doing there.
If your license and vehicle registration don’t “match” it creates suspicion. Perfectly ok if you are never detained for traffic violations of suspicion of crime, like a “high value vehicle” transiting a “known drug/weapon/human smuggling area” Then it’s “Gee Mr. Highmucketymuck, your license says you live in Bakersfield, but ... your fancy truck is an LLC registered in Bozeman? License expiration shows you got your license 2 years ago, where do you live? How long?
But they won’t bother with sales tax -- Oh yes they will. Traffic cops are part of the same game
@GCATX mentioned and they are all in.
Save money if you can. But do it smartly and don’t save 10k now to be fined 15k later, or whatever the possible outcome is.