Posted on 03/31/2021 7:30:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
Beneath the supposed good reason they give for changing how drivers are taxed is the real reason they want the change: driving offers people too much freedom./em>
resident Joe Biden has proven he’s a fan of dropping taxpayer cash from helicopters. He’s also shown no signs of slowing down, with the latest push being for trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending. Transportation Secretary Buttigieg, né Mayor Pete, floated some ideas about how to raise taxes on drivers to help fund this.
In comments to CNBC, Buttigieg signaled support for moving away from consumption-based gasoline taxes to taxes based on usage. In other words, he wants to tax people for how much they drive. Doing so, he said, “[S]hows a lot of promise if we believe in that so-called user-pays principle: The idea that part of how we pay for roads is you pay based on how much you drive.”
After facing immediate backlash, Buttigieg quickly backed off the idea, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper a mileage tax is “not part of the conversation about this infrastructure bill.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not far off, and it’s worth digging into.
The biggest problem with paying per mile is that we already pay based on how much we drive. It’s a not-so-little thing called the gasoline tax, and you pay it every time you fill up. But for the big spenders around the country, particularly given how COVID has changed driving patterns, the gas tax is proving insufficient. Now, they’re looking for new ways to bring home the bacon.
While they’ll tell you it’s about potholes — and Buttigieg is certainly no stranger to potholes — it’s likely that Biden’s infrastructure proposal will contain lots of things not related to infrastructure, much like the recently-passed COVID relief bill. It’s just how they roll.
Yet it’s not how we, as Americans, should roll. Instead, we should flip the spike strip back on any technocrats attempting to foist this on us. We shouldn’t resist just because the idea would have punished drivers and car manufacturers for responding to pushes for increased fuel efficiency. It’s not just because government-funded roads are financed with theft. It’s not even because the idea of tracking us while we drive is creepy and authoritarian.
Okay, maybe it is mostly about that last one. But look, if the government wants to tax people who drive electric vehicles and don’t pay gas taxes, it can do that. Instead, governments give buyers tax credits then bemoan the lost revenue. If it seems like they’re trying to punish people who drive conventional cars because others responded to incentives in ways the technocrats prefer, that’s because they are.
That isn’t a compelling reason to put a GPS tracker in all of our vehicles and monitor our vehicles’ every movement. At least they could be honest about it and just track our smartphone data. Then they’d catch us in those moments when we’re a passenger in a vehicle. That’s still used, right?
We can’t have people attempting to hide their road use by carpooling or taking public transit, can we? The time for free riders is over. Pedestrians, you’re next, particularly if you’ve put on a few pounds during the pandemic.
Sure, that sounds ridiculous now. Just give it a few years. This isn’t really about roads or infrastructure; it’s about controlling our behavior. Average citizens are just not smart or informed enough to be trusted with freedom, so we need nerds who mostly hate cars because they’re scared of them to show us the way.
Sorry, but no. Driving is awesome. There’s something about just getting behind the wheel and going. There’s something about not having strictly planned routes and schedules imposed on your journey. There’s something about the ability to hit the road without worrying that the government may have figured out that you stopped to buy some vegetables from an unlicensed stand.
But freedom is passe these days, so we have to listen to unelected bureaucrats wax philosophical on ways to limit it, as though they haven’t done enough of that the past year.
During the early days of the pandemic, when my kids had grown restless at home, we embarked on a new path. Around 5 p.m. each night, when I could call it quits for the day, we’d get into my car. I’d crank Taylor Swift for them and then head toward the rural highways close to our house. They’d jam to “22,” I’d jam to carving through corners.
It wasn’t exactly a revival of the Sunday Drive, but it was a way to bring some normalcy to our locked down lives. As I put premium in my car, I was paying plenty of taxes toward the roads we traveled on.
But Pothole Pete and the gang aren’t really concerned with the state of those roads. Beneath the supposed good reason they give for changing how drivers are taxed is the real reason they want the change: driving offers people too much autonomy, too much freedom. That cannot be tolerated. That’s why we need people who refuse to tolerate it.
In a different time, Burt Reynolds was lauded for his performance in “Smokey and the Bandit,” a noble tale of a bootlegger running cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta while constantly working to evade Sheriff Justice, the dogged cop played by Jackie Gleason. In one scene, after Justice and his son are run off the road, the sheriff says, “What we’re dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law.”
What we as Americans need to deal with, as technocrats attempt to increase how much they rule every aspect of our lives, is that we should make them say the same about us. We may not be ferrying a load of illicit Coors to a wedding, but we can still crank up “East Bound and Down,” hit the gas, and remember that freedom is out there and that we don’t need a digital Sheriff Justice plugged into our dashboards while we pursue it.
Barack Obama -” We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as... We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership.”
Im sensing a trend....
“We may not be ferrying a load of illicit Coors to a wedding”
Neither was the Bandit. Big Enos Burdette had a boy running in the Southern Classic, and he wanted to celebrate in style when his driver won. Carrie/Frog/Gidget was escaping her wedding.
“While they’ll tell you it’s about potholes — and Buttigieg is certainly no stranger to potholes — it’s likely that Biden’s infrastructure proposal will contain lots of things not related to infrastructure, much like the recently-passed COVID relief bill. It’s just how they roll.”
PotHOLES, ‘how they roll’!!! I like it, finally our side having some fun with their carnival acts.
That way, you can dump the compliance part on the paid tax preparer or Turbo Tax. Putting an electronic device on each vehicle would be more expensive and take longer. If nothing else, the 1040 would be an interim step.
Before ANY new taxes on the middle class are imposed, Trump’s corporate tax cuts must be cancelled.
What’s ironic to me is that I actually like a “pay-by-the-mile” scheme as a way of funding our roadways.
With one huge, I am defining it as truly gargantuan, caveat...
That we completely PRIVATIZE our entire road system. Government completely cut out of the enterprise. 100%.
I have 212’ of road frontage on my property. The County recently had it repaved, with the exact same surface, for $8500 that was assessed against my property taxes. I got a quote from a local asphalt company to do the same thing, with a sidewalk and reflective striping that the County did NOT do, for $2100.
No one can convince me that Government/Union contracts are providing us with a necessary and efficient service in regards to our transportation systems. Period.
I am vehemently opposed to the government implementing a pay-by-mile system because the abuses inherent in that system when done by government would be truly legendary.
The Empire declares that all drivers must show evidence of a vaccine to drive their vehicles.
If found in violation, you will be subject to a further tax penalty.
The price will always go up and the quality go down.
The same bad roads and bridges will still exist and the politicians will have big homes and not be tracked.
BTT
Worse than that, Oregon tried this BS in a pilot program. They dropped it and just jacked registration fees for electric cars.
Their tool of choice under said program?
Black boxes on all cars.
It looks like Xiden Buttboy has decided he/she/it wants to control MY freedom. Sorry sonny. It will be a cold day in hell.
It looks as though they’re getting closer to what this mileage tax REALLY entails, but they’re still not quite there.
Here’s a few things to consider once they have real-time monitoring of your vehicle’s movements:
1) First, nothing makes this mileage tax the same for all vehicles. Drive and F150, and you may well be 5 times what you would for a Honda Accord - it’s up to ‘them’ and they will be able to base the rate on just how badly they want you out of that truck and into something more ‘sustainable’.
2) On top of that, consider that your mileage rate may depend on what time you drive. Drive during rush hour, pay much more.
3) On top of that, consider that the mileage rate may also depend on where and on what roads you travel on. Drive in a Red State pay more, drive in a red area (of any state), pay more. Drive in the Hampton’s, pay less.
4) On top of that, consider what happens if they decide to link your rate to your reported income. Make more - pay more, for the same driving (no different than how college tuition is now calculated...you just never thought of it that way).
5) And, of course, it doesn’t have to be revenue-neutral, as the gas tax is. In Pennsylvania, people who drive their turnpike are paying for mass transit in Phili and Pittsburgh - running the highways itself costs next to nothing, but those cities are huge money drains.
I realize that Rush and lots of people hate the gas tax and would just love to see it gone, I get that, but when you consider both the freedom you give up and the open-ended cost of a mileage tax, you’d dream of those gas tax days (just as even one more RINO in place of a Senate Democrat would resulted in the protection of legal ownership of guns...in other words, yes, it can get worse, it can ALWAYS get worse).
Get out your Carter-era sweaters and get ready to only buy gasoline on odd or even days depending on your license plate.
Poor and working class hardest hit, less traffic on the streets for the high earners. More people driving without insurance too, that will be fun. That means more hit and run accidents. Also, higher costs for everything that requires physical delivery.
This is going to be just great.
I have a concern, that we will end up with both a gas tax and a mileage tax.
Indeed, I think every state levies a state gas tax, so we will will still be paying that.
I gave a feeling that even if the federal gas tax were replaced by a mileage tax, that somehow we would end up paying more than we are now.
The taxes generated won't go towards infrastructure anyway. They'll go into the general fund or be earmarked for friends of the congresscum.
“I gave a feeling that even if the federal gas tax were replaced by a mileage tax, that somehow we would end up paying more than we are now.”
That’s a given, but I don’t worry about that, since the mileage tax will wind up costing most people 3 to 10 times what the gas tax costs, so keeping the gas tax would barely be noticed.
This is factually incorrect on one hand, and highly misleading from another perspective.
1. Electric vehicles pay $0 in fuel taxes, and their numbers are consistently growing as part of the nation's overall vehicle fleet.
2. Due to improvements in fuel efficiency over time for gasoline- and diesel- powered vehicles, motorists actually pay LESS in taxes today per mile of travel than they did ten years ago. In fact, many motorists may pay less in fuel taxes today than ten years ago even if they are driving MORE.
This is what the Federal and state governments are up against here, folks:
There's no objective view of transportation assets where this mindset makes any sense at all.
Vehicle insurance carriers have been hyping savings to drivers that when they put a device in their vehicles it will accurately document their driving habits and mileage in order to get a lower insurance premium.
Yes, and that black box will tie into the vehicle black box to obtain exact vehicle speed, braking, operator vehicle handling and many more inputs about the driver operator.
And we know that the government is salivating over all of the data to utilize against vehicle owners to tax and punish owners for unapproved and and anti-environmental useage.
Insurers responding to competitive pressures and the early success of pay as you go premiums began offering their own take on black box technology to customers. Customers are invited to install the devices with the promise of discounts of up to 50 percent. The most aggressively marketed of these is Snapshot from Progressive. All of the devices connect to a port on your car’s steering column. Snapshot tracks how often you brake hard, how many miles you drive each day, and how often you drive between midnight and 4 AM. Some Snapshot devices use GPS to track location, which Progressive says is just for research purposes.
https://www.thesimpledollar.com/insurance/auto/the-rise-of-black-box-car-insurance/
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