Taxing Mileage to raise Revenue ??????

What I want to get done, I need to privately fund. Guns, or butter - it matters not, nor do so-called political party labels (all current U.S. parties are equally guilty of continuing the suffering), nor slippery words like 'liberal' or 'conservative'. Those latter two, do you mean socially, fiscally, ???

My only concern is that folks not be allowed to ballot away others rights. I do not have a right, along with 50.0% of my neighbors, to vote to have the government put lethal force to your head to collect money from you.

Voluntary charity, and payment for services rendered from private parties is fine. A vote to increase taxes is a vote to impose slavery on others, plain and simple.

Government is not the answer, it's the disease, masquerading as the cure. Government produces nothing itself, it must take from someone to give a portion of it back to someone else (we all know inefficiencies there mean not that much is given back - much is used up as the lifeblood of the juggernaut, nu?)

This is not a fact of economic class, either. Note the barest essentials of life, shelter and food, are taxed (as well as subsidized!) - those in government will insure they keep taxes high on all classes, even as all of those classes attempt to evade the taxation.

Everything in the world that is a good (not a service) is either mined, or grown. It is taxed at every step of the path : the machines and people who help wrest it from the earth, transport to the refinement process, that process itself, transport to and at a distributor, then to a dealer (or grocery store, etc.) The tax is along at each stage, savaging parts of your life that could have been used productively, for yourself or your family.

A government who taxes your 'income' from another of their failed schemes ("Social Security" is not...) won't hesitate to tax you on top of the taxes you already pay for transport : taxes on the vehicle, and on the fuel, and on the tires . . . . heck, property tax means you don't even own it. Fail to pay the yearly rent on your house or vehicle, and find out the consequeneces.

I could continue, but those who have any semblance of freedom left in their soul should understand the last thing we need is another chunk of life cut out of every man, woman and child here.

ANd thats the way things, for the most part, started here in the US....not real clear where we went wrong......regardless...we're long overdue on putting it back the way it was.

The politicians love people like you.

As long as we stay with our outdated and divided electrical grid, we will never be able to effectively develop the alternative energy sources that we nedd to ween ourselves from a dependence on oil. How can anyone call that "fine"?

It's hard to think of something that isn't taxed. So the problem is how to keep feeding the gov't money when the very same gov't tries to influence citizen's behavior.
Mandate higher gas milage and the tax collected per gallon goes down.
Pass anti-smoking laws and the cigarette tax revenues go down.

Since the gov't has to maintain it's revenue stream, new taxes are invented every day. Milage tax, Safety tax, Passenger Tax, breathing tax.
And how about that high-speed rail they want? Gonna be a tax for that, for sure.

Tis true - there have even have been taxes on taxes (surtax).

I would hate to see GPS get disrupted but I have ample faith in the FCC to do the wrong thing. They have already given preliminary approval in January and final approval is expected in mid-June. LightSquared has been tasked with reporting on the interference issues with their technology and that report will show no significant issues (why would a report prepared by the company that doesn't want any reported interference show otherwise?).

LightSquared has $14 billion in investor backing. At least fifteen companies are already looking to strike deals with them for wholesale access to their as-yet-to-be-built LTE network. In the end I believe their money, government insiders and lobbyists will push aside any technical issues and get the network built. At least we will know in about three months as the licensing process has been fastracked.

Also the other monkey wrench thrown into the equation is the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. In order for that to get approved there needs to be proof of ample competition. LightSquared is the competitor that AT&T can point to in order to convince regulators (ie. allow regulators to cover their collective butts) to approve the merger next March.

Remember a few years ago when almost the entire East coast of the US went dark?
And what about all the bridges that are deemed unsafe. They are either closed or in need of closing.
A lot of the roads are in desperate need of repair.

I suggest they, they being the god like creatures who run this country, start a breathing tax. Hell, why not? We are the ones getting the air dirty and think of all the money that has been spent and will continue to be spent on cleaning up the air.

I suggest that people with emphysema pay the lowest rate (lower usage)and the physically fit pay a sure charge for over usage of our air.

Come on politicians you guys can come up with more exciting ways to shaft us out of our money, can't you?

Indeed. The people always get the government they want / will put up with.

A different slant : most folks want certain regulations, you know, 'for the good of the other guy' . . . so this leaves us with a few options :

1. One person can tell everyone what to do / how to live.

2. Everyone can tell everyone what to do / how to live (you're seeing the results here : Hello, Democratic Republic Additional Tax!!!)

3. No one gets to tells others how to live.

The private property rights (life being just another sort of property) inherent in #3 are too much for many to fathom - they have no basis to even really contemplate how things were, a couple hundred years ago in the United States.

Taxation and Conscription feed the State, and war is the healthy condition of the State.

Consider the additional intrusiveness that will be needed to effectively manage this new mileage tax. Again, not a party thing - they're both equally guilty of expanding the State over the people.

Someone brought up mass transit. No problem with that at all - if the people want it, and it's cost effective, by all means, let it be privately funded. Of course, people overwhelmingly reject mass transit, given other options, and the vast majority of mass transit loses money, and is heavily subsidized by your work / taxes.

Ahh, too much that we could go on with here. Suffice it to say, I'll never vote for any tax on you (or your fuel, your GPS, your mileage, your tires . . . well, anything). Doing so would grossly violate my principles, by asking someone else to wield force against you, to steal your money.

I am unclear about your statement about "the way things, for the most part, started here in the US" and wanting to put exactly what back the way it was.

It would seem that at every point in time during our country's history we get some things right and other things wrong. So to say that we want the laws and regulations back the way they were in, say 1900, does not make sense to me.

I read one article that stated that by taxing drivers on usage they could lower the tax on gas (in theory the drivers that used the most would pay the most)
This is something you could bank on!
Bad enough you have to worry about bird droppings now we would have to worry about the flying pigs.

Uh no.

This was here long before the Dems. Obama is not to blame for all of America's history and woes, despite popular Repub opinion.

In fact, this seems to be America's favourite past time, even surpassing 'Jeopardy'.

Governments built and paved just about every road you drive on. Governments put the satellites in the sky that enable your GPS. I'd say things government actually produced are essential to your very interest in this website and forum.

"The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks."

So, the government is also responsible for the mechanism that allows people on this site to say that "Government produces nothing itself"

Many of the comments in this thread deal with a dislike for government and, especially, taxes. I just read an article in Newsweek about how little US citizens know about the government (what was called a Citizenship test). If you are interested in the article, it can be found at
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/how-dumb-are-we.html

I found these paragraphs applicable to this discussion.

"The current conflict over government spending illustrates the new dangers of ignorance. Every economist knows how to deal with the debt: cost-saving reforms to big-ticket entitlement programs; cuts to our bloated defense budget; and (if growth remains slow) tax reforms designed to refill our depleted revenue coffers. But poll after poll shows that voters have no clue what the budget actually looks like. A 2010 World Public Opinion survey found that Americans want to tackle deficits by cutting foreign aid from what they believe is the current level (27 percent of the budget) to a more prudent 13 percent. The real number is under 1 percent. A Jan. 25 CNN poll, meanwhile, discovered that even though 71 percent of voters want smaller government, vast majorities oppose cuts to Medicare (81 percent), Social Security (78 percent), and Medicaid (70 percent). Instead, they prefer to slash waste—a category that, in their fantasy world, seems to include 50 percent of spending, according to a 2009 Gallup poll.

Needless to say, it’s impossible to balance the budget by listening to these people.”

The maintenance and building of roads cost money. Naturally I don't want to pay a cent for them while I use them.

As long as politicians and corporations have us blaming them for trying to grab our money, they keep us distracted enough to allow them to slip new laws and equipment into our lives for more disturbing reasons.

One insurance company is currently promoting a "device" that monitors the way people drive, supposedly as a means to reduce premiums for safe drivers. Never mind that the current method used is a better indicator of how accident prone a given driver is.

The tax scheme is so blatantly ridiculous that even the contrived arguments for it are directly opposed and nonsensical. (I'm paraphrasing) "It will increase revenue from hybrid vehicles" and "It will increase revenue from those who drive and pollute the most"

Neither the government or corporate America need more money (like all greedy beings, they WANT more though). .. So what's the reason for this grand new use of GPS technology?

The single underlying thread that's received very little comment here, is this disquieting need of those in power (commercial and political) to gain the ability to track American citizens. Both groups seem to be anxious to bring this type of technology into our lives. If we let this happen the ultimate result will be the theft of our liberties, not our money.

The government has produced rope the medicare-financed scooter riding teatards are using to hang it, while the capitalists bamboozle the rubes about the evils of state socialism...