If you don’t wan’t your dog to run away, you leash him. The government doesn’t want you to run away, either – but has a different kind of leash in mind.
The commuter tax.
It’s called the mileage tax but like so many things being pushed down our throats the term used doesn’t describe what’s actually meant.
What’s described by proponents such as Rep. Peter DeFazio, a liberal Democrat from Oregon who unfortunately chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is a merely modern replacement for the gas tax.
But what’s meant is a tax on driving – and the distinction is critical to grok.
When you buy gas, part of what you’re paying is tax, about 50 cents or so in federal and state taxes, folded into the price. But where – and how far – you go aren’t taxed.
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The commuter tax (and DeFazio wants a federal commuter tax) will tax them both – punishing you for distance – which means punishing commuters and others who need to drive more rather than less to get to and from their place of employment.
As well as just driving, period.
Put another way, it will be a new nudge – to use the word favored by the coercive utopians pushing this – to get people to not drive as far or as much. To nudge them closer to cities they want the proletariat herded into – by making it cost too much to live “too far” away from them.
Interestingly, it will do this by punishing people who bought an efficient car – for the sake of reducing their cost to drive.
Which will go up, if this new tax comes to pass – as DeFazio and others in Congress, including a number of “conservative” Republicans such as Rep. Same Graves of Missouri are demanding.
Unless new subsidies are created to compensate the owner of, say, a 40 MPG economy car he will pay the same tax on his driving as the owner of an 18 MPG SUV if they both drive the same distance. There will no longer be any good reason to buy an “economical” car.
And both will have their driving tracked by the government.
