Thursday, May 5, 2011

Obama Administration Seeks to Tax and Track Drivers with GPS Box

While the White House continues to change its story on the successful operation that took out OBL, this administration’s efforts to raise taxes and infringe upon your privacy proceed apace.
You’re gonna love this.

Under this plan, a study group would be established that would evaluate the feasibility of taxing drivers using the number of miles driven. And you’ll never guess how they plan to do it. Go on, guess. I’ll wait.

If you guessed they want to put a GPS device on your vehicle to track where you’ve been and when, then, Don Pardo, tell them what they’ve won!

Never mind that we’re already taxed for each mile we drive. That’s done through the taxes that the federal government and state and local municipalities impose on every gallon of gas we buy. Now, they want to install a GPS device in order to track the number of miles you drive. And if you think that’s all the information that will be gleaned from that little black box in your car, then, by all means, let them install one on your vehicle.

I’d rather not.

It’s crystal clear to me why the feds want to do this, as it should be to you. This is yet another of the ways the hoax of man-made global warming is being used as a political tool for the government to remove your Constitutional freedom of movement and your God-given right to privacy.

Pardon me, but I don’t remember telling any of my elected representatives that I wanted this done. And I can’t find anything horribly deficient with the current method of taxation. They seem to be able to collect a fair amount of money from us every day. What’s really funny is how this administration points to the eight cents of profit that the big, eeevilll oil companies make on every gallon as if that number is somehow outrageously high, but neglect to tell you how much money they make from that sale: an average of forty-one cents per gallon. And that’s without any of the overhead that the big, eeevilll oil companies incur in bringing that product to you.

So, pardon me once again. I fail to grasp why this is even being considered.

I can do some educated guessing, though. I can recall a time when we had enough money for what’s now called “infrastructure maintenance.” Of course, that was before the era of big public sector unions and their leech-like effect upon taxpayers. Where once we didn’t have the financial burden of paying outrageous union benefits with our tax monies, increasingly we’re seeing the decidedly negative impact of these union contracts as our roads and bridges fall into disrepair because of the sky-high benefits that the unions have extracted from the pockets of taxpayers. We used to pay taxes for road repair, but now all that money is going to fund lavish lifestyles for union members.

And I seem to recall all of the Stimulus money that was promised to trickle down to the local level in the form of infrastructure spending to do what used to be done with transportation tax money. Funny, I haven’t seen one new road or bridge being built, or even a road being repaved with any of that $800B dollars I was told about, have you?

I can also guess that someone in a cubicle somewhere in the bowels of the Transportation Department crunched the numbers on the reduced amount of tax revenue the government would realize as a result of encouraging us to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles and use public transportation and other modes of getting around.

So, why not just raise the gas tax? Why go through the trouble and expense of outfitting every vehicle in the US with a GPS device to track our driving habits? I wonder who would benefit from the contract for such an expensive undertaking. GE maybe? Or another of Obama’s corporate cronies with strong union ties? The public-sector unions who would doubtless people the new departments(s) required for this massive new program and their Democrat supporters?

Regardless of who benefits, this is an idea that should be squashed right now. There is no compelling need for this at all. Our travels are our private business and no one else’s. And we're taxed enough already.

This administration just might find a bit of resistance to this program.

Just a bit.

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