The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Conrad Is A Knob, And We Need To Attack The Lousy Assertions Behind His Ideas

Posted on | March 25, 2011 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Hot Air has a post on Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) idea of implementing a mileage tax.
You can’t fault a Progressive, I suppose, for wanting to build on the resounding success that is ObamaCare. By ‘resounding’ I mean ‘utter’, and by ‘success’, I, of course, mean ‘debacle’.
But it’s worse than that. Hot Air goes after the particulars, emphasis mine:

A “practical option” for whom, exactly? Perhaps for the IRS, but certainly not for taxpayers. One shudders to think what happens when the IRS gets your annual mileage wrong and a taxpayer disputes the record. Where were you on the night of April 19th, Canarsie? We show you drove 6.3 miles to Bada-Bing Strip Club in New Jersey. Even if exact destinations aren’t recorded (earlier suggestions were to use GPS devices), the taxpayer would get hit with a massive bill during the annual tax-preparation ritual with little or no chance to dispute the claims of the government.

Plus, let’s talk about equipment costs, both private and public. This new tax system would require tracking equipment in every vehicle, which would mean retrofit costs for current vehicles and higher prices for new cars immediately. What are the unemployed supposed to do — stop driving? That should help when it comes to looking for work.

The government will either have to use GPS devices (that will track and record destination data) or install tollbooth passes every few miles on every road in America. The IRS will also have to set up an enforcement bureau to ensure that drivers don’t disable their tracking systems. In California, this meant that every driver had to get semiannual emission-control equipment inspections, an expensive waste of time and money for most drivers. Will the IRS, which is just now branching out into the health-insurance inspection business, add a national DMV bureau as well?

Finally, do we really want to live in a country where the federal government virtually follows you everywhere you go? Growing up in the Cold War, that’s what we were told the Soviet Union was like. It will be the high-tech version of internal travel documents, or at the very least puts that power in the hands of the federal government.

Well, I’m certain that Conrad himself is rich and connected enough to afford privacy.
The real deal is that the Senate no longer represents the interests of individual states, or their citizens. He, and the rest of that sorry lot, are looking at the Federal Ruling Elite Club, and figuring out what they have to do to squeeze more loot out of We The People to fund the Club. The velvet entitlement handcuffs both manage the votes and serve as a source of propaganda about how they are crafting the socialist Utopia. Beyond the propaganda, the country is a debt shambles.
So we need to tell the Conrad variations in every State to just get stuffed. Vote them out. Expose the truth that, even if they’ve taken a few phrases of the Constitution as a fig leaf to cover their lousy ideas, they have effectively urinated on the document and the graves of the Founders.

Liberty!

 

Category: Politics

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