Can’t levy gas taxes on electric cars? No worries, enact a tax on each mile driven. Problem solved. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
The government has been pushing “fuel efficient” cars on the public for decades – and now intends to punish the public for driving them.
By taxing them by the mile. To make up for their fuel efficiency. Ostensibly, to make up for the loss of “revenue” that isn’t being collected – via the tax on fuel. Which, of course, will still be collected, in full – in addition to the tax on driving.
This tells us the object of the exercise isn’t to reduce fuel consumption.
It is to reduce driving. By making it more and more expensive to drive.
Not just by taxing it by the mile, either.
This tax will inevitably morph into taxing by time – as of day. This is called “congestion pricing” – and it means taxing people for when (and where) they drive – as during “peak” times, such as the morning drive and the evening drive home. So as to discourage people from driving when they need to drive and encourage them to ride . . . government forms of transportation: The ever-unpopular bus or train, which can only become popular by making it too expensive to drive.
This has been the underlying goal all along but now it’s becoming explicit. The recently (s)elected Biden regime’s secretary of transportation recently came out – so to speak – in favor of mulcting-by-the-mile at the federal level and in states such as Oregon, there is legislation afoot to impose the same idea at that level.
The Oregon legislation would impose a tax-by-mile on “fuel efficient” vehicles beginning in 2026.
Which vehicles qualify as “fuel efficient” enough to have their gas mileage advantage become a tax liability? Any car that achieves 30 MPG or more – as well as electric cars and hybrid cars – the irony of which is probably lost on the people who bought them thinking at least in part about how much money they were going to save on gas.
