Tag Archives: Gas taxes

The New Gas Tax By Another Name, by Eric Peters

A tax is a tax is a tax; regardless of what they call it, it takes money out of your pocket. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

One of the ways that gas taxes will be increased is by not calling them that. It goes down easier – like the “shared responsibility payment” you’re forced to pay for not paying the health insurance mafia for an Obamacare policy you don’t want to buy.

Instead, the new gas taxes will be called carbon taxes – which makes it easier to shame-silence objections to them. This is an important tactical consideration for the Left especially because gas taxes are already the most regressive taxes on a necessity extant. Only a handful of things – like cigarettes – are taxed more punitively and disproportionately.

But most people don’t smoke – and no one has to. 

Driving is different – even if you don’t. Because someone else has to. Like the guy who drives the truck that brings your food to the store and practically everything else you need to live.

The delivery cost of which is reflected in the cost to you.

Plus the cost of making what’s delivered – almost all of which involves energy and almost all of that involves gasoline.

An increase in gas taxes – technically, motor fuels taxes, encompassing diesel fuel as well as gasoline –  is therefore a hard sell, politically, when you’re a politician posturing as a “progressive.” Like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for instance – who is now fief underlord of the president selected by the Left to lord it over the entire country.

Continue reading→

Orange Mordita, by Eric Peters

Just what this country needs—higher gas taxes! From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:

Trump rode a wave of average man outrage into the Oval Office. But the Orange Man could be swept out of it just as easily if he pursues what he has hinted at doing – raise the federal tax on gas.

Not by a little bit, either.

Nothing could be more politically suicidal. Besides which, it is just a terrible idea. More money to Uncle means, inevitably, less freedom for us. More ways to extort the states to impose more freedom-stifling outrages – everything from (historically) dumbed-down DUI standards – and the vile East German-style checkpoints to go with – as well as “buckle up” laws and dumbed-down speed limit regimes.

Giving Uncle more money is – as the saying goes – like giving an idiot child a machine gun. Trump ought to know this. Don’t feed the Swamp Thing.

Continue reading→

The Hidden Gas Tax Cometh, by Eric Peters

The government has all sorts of ways to get its slimey hands into your pockets. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:

Raising the gas tax – overtly – is politcal TNT.

Chiefly because it’s a tax everyone feels, every day – and it’s an extremely disproportionate tax already. About 50 cents per gallon – which amounts to a roughly 20 percent tax added to the cost of every gallon of fuel. The government makes (takes) more money off each gallon than the Evil Oil Companies earn from the sale of each gallon. Yes, really.

The gas tax is also extremely regressive, in the language of the politically correct. It hits those least able to afford the cost the hardest.

So how to raise it covertly?

By raising the mandatory minimum octane rating.

This is being urged by the car companies, who would like to be able to design all their engines to be high-compression engines, which are more fuel-efficient engines – but require high-octane fuel to achieve the efficiency gains.

And because it’s a cheaper way for them to achieve compliance with Uncle’s fuel efficiency fatwas. A roughly 3-4 percent uptick in MPGs can be obtained via high-compression (and turbo-supercharging) engines without resorting to more expensive engineering extremes, such as transmissions with 10 speeds, three of them overdrive. Or direct injection, with a port fuel injection system in addition and added solely to deal with the carbon fouling problems caused by the direct injection. Or light weight but easily damaged, more expensive and harder to repair alloy bodies. Etc.

The ethanol lobby wants it, too – because it’s a clever way to obfuscate the currently-too-obvious crony capitalist corn con, which operates under the auspices of the Renewable Fuel Standard. The RFS is a federal mandate that the nation’s fuel supply be adulterated with “renewable” fuels, in the name of conservation. In fact, it is a government mandate to feed our cars ethanol, which is made from corn. Which costs more to turn into alcohol than oil into gas – and won’t take your car as far on a gallon, either.

It’s a billion dollar business, if you can use that word without feeling the bile rise in your throat.

To continue reading: The Hidden Gas Tax Cometh