All that encouragement to buy fuel-efficient vehicles leads to this! I guess it is a variant of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
With the added benefit the state gets to track you everywhere you go.
How long before someone figured how to take this off the car & leave it in the garage...while they drove around town?
Portland has a nice little racket going. They severely restrict land use by prohibiting the building of intown high-density housing, forcing new residents to live farther and farther from the city, then penalize those same residents for living so far away. Nice job, leftists.
The privacy issue put aside for the moment, this is a simple and pure tax increase.
Once the state starts tracking who drives what miles, heavy use vehicles like truckers will be taxed at a higher rate, which will drive up costs to transport goods and services.
A hidden tax that will be passed onto consumers
I take it that the Hummer and the Honda Prius will be paying the same tax for miles driven even though one pollutes 8 times more than the other? Silly Dems.
Enforcement raises so many questions. They would have to get into issues of blocking the GPS rcvr in order to conceal how many miles are driven. That leads to questions on parking the car in a garage or under a carport, trees etc.
Next comes inspections of one's home by ODOT, to prove that one has a garage. ODOT would then have to look at driving patterns and history for evidence of fraud.
I can see the enforcement of this tax procedure getting to be very expensive and entrusive. Far better to keep the simple consumption tax.
And, if there is a reduction in the price of household goods (such as appliances), sales tax revenues will fall. So Oregon will probably begin tracking, and taxing, based on how many loads of wash you run or how many times you use the blender or coffee pot.
Officials can then use real-time GPS to watch drivers fleeing the state for good.
I bet after they put it on they send you an installation fee, and charge you for the box.
This is BS to the max. But then, no one ever accused libs of being smart.
Their claim is that miles driven causes wear and tear on the roads, but that the smaller cars are driven more miles per gallon and therefore are tearing up the roads more without paying higher taxes at the pump. Well this is purely stupid-lib-think.
Smaller vehicles cause far less damage per mile that a heavy truck. In fact, if a road is well designed and well installed, even a medium sized car will do virutally no damage to the road. Poor road design, poor materials, poor installation, extreme weather, salt, plows, and heavy trucks with poor suspension do FAR, FAR more damage to roads than most passenger vehicles.
Look at well designed and built airport runways and tarmacs. They don't crumble under the weight of an 910,000 lb fueled 747. When was the last time you saw potholes being filled on a commercial runway?
If they want to tax miles driven on the poor suckers of Oregon, then just include a declaration of miles driven on their annual state income tax. They will still be idiots, though.
Take note. This will happen everywhere that liberals get into power.
If the voters are not responsible, then why vote?
This will cost millions (if not more) to implement. Compliance will have to be enforced, lawsuits will have to be defended. Older cars will have to be retrofitted with the devices --and you can bet that folks who can barely afford to put tires on their "hoopty" are going to scream pretty loud at the cost of installing a GPS tracking device.
What a harebrained scheme. It won't go anywhere. Then again. . .
The test program uses a global positioning system to track miles driven, using a black box to calculate how many miles are clocked in-state, out of state and during rush hour.
Libs judge others by their actions and they judge themselves by thier intentions..............
Do as I say, not as I do!
The liberals are sacrificing privacy for the environment.
President Bush is sacrificing privacy for some made-up terrorist threat.
Once again, liberals demonstrate their priorities.
"Gas tax on miles, not gallons, tested PORTLAND"
What a brilliant idea! These guys are so creative. High five one another for a job well done.
It pains me to think I will probably never reach this level of intelligence.