Vehicle Miles Traveled; Yet Another Ridiculous Tax

Just in case you felt like you weren't being taxed enough, the Congressional Budget Office is considering raising revenue by taxing people on how many miles they drive. No joke. I couldn't make something that stupid up. The Vehicle Miles Traveled. VMT, not to be confused with the popular country music channel CMT, is intended to be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance at a time when federal funds are short. The effort is being led by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), yeah another Democrat proposing another tax, who said the VMT was a way to solve the problem of collecting less taxes as people move to more fuel-efficient vehicles. 


So let me get this straight. This Democrat wants to tax us at the pump and on the road? Why should we be double taxed? Conrad did not want to tax gas so he decided to tax the use of the roads themselves. What's the difference? Whether you tax us at the pump or tax us on the road it is still going to affect us in the pocket.


Besides the obvious another problem with this proposal is that new technology would have to be developed and installed in new vehicles to track the miles traveled in each vehicle. Older vehicles would have to be retrofitted, that would cost money to do.  Nothing is free. But the icing on the cake is having big brother inside your car with you. The government would know, I'm sorry not just know but would be tracking every mile you travel. They will know how many miles you travel per day, they will know how far you and your family travel on your summer vacations and in theory they can even track where you are using a certain mile radius. Why should the government have all that information? Why should we allow the government to intrude into our lives like that? In essence this VMT device would not just be a mileage tracking device but a sort of GPS style tracking device on every car. Is that what we want? I don't know about you but I sure don't want that.


I'm really getting sick and tired of hearing these ridiculous proposals for what Democrats consider to be sources of income when they are really intrusions in our lives.  In Texas Democrats want to prevent obesity by taxing every soft drink we drink whether it has calories or not, Democrats in Congress want to track every mile we drive to help pay for the maintenance of roads. I wouldn't be surprised if some crazy Democrat would jump in and propose a walking tax to have those who don't drive but walk across roads help bring in revenue to maintain the roads or propose  a breathing tax to help the government pay for the enforcement of clean air standards. Yeah, my examples may sound a little extreme but they are not that far from what Democrats are proposing now. Normally people who take your hard earned money are called thieves. But since Democrats are taking your money in little increments here and little increments there they don't consider themselves to be thieves. I don't know about you but I was taught that a thief was a thief was a thief, even if they wore a tie and suit.