mileage tax

Excuse my tax-loathing Republicanism here, but somehow this tax strikes me as a bit of a misstep. Proposing to tax mileage instead of (or god help us - in addition to) gasoline is terrible. Its simply a horrible idea and really doesn't strike me as The Change We Need. Something about a Republican proposing a tax increase of any kind strikes me as more than a tad unseemly as well. There must be some sort of horrible side effect to it, like screwing over the working poor or making large corporations rich. Hmm, let me think of what it must be...

... oh of course. It helps kill the environment faster! What, you say? Discouraging the use of cars somehow hurts the environment? That's un-possible! Well, this measure really does hurt dear old mother nature, and in a pretty underhanded and not-so-obvious way. You see, dear reader, by taxing miles instead of gas consumption, the regulation would encourage people to drive whatever car they please. There would be much less incentive to drive a light-on-the-gas Prius or Civic and relatively little penalty for driving a gas-guzzling Dodge Ram or some other musclebound nonsense car. As a result, the emerging push towards green cars would stall in a big way. Why invest in making cars more green when people will no longer demand that their cars be gas-efficient? Its a terrible notion; not only does it hurt the environment on the front-end, it also has detrimental effects on our push to rid ourselves of foreign oil as a matter of policy.

So what to do about the budget gap for infrastructure? Well, making the stimulus bill less laden with some of the more useless crap would have been a good start. Since that one is already in the books, I would say that a reasonable solution is to make a special provision in some upcoming massive spending bill (there will certainly be one) with a significant amount of it dedicated to much needed infrastructure improvement. That way the only people who will pay will be future generations of Americans yet to be born, who will hopefully have some sort of environment left to enjoy.