A proposal currently being discussed at the Metrapolitan Transportation Commission will tax every driver, driving anywhere in the nine Bay Area Counties.
The new tax rate proposal is Ten cents for every mile driven. It does not matter if the miles driven are to the Doctors office, the grocery store, the commute to and from work, or to church.
Drivers will be required to equip their vehicles with GPS or similar devices. This includes all fossil fuel burning vehicles, propane vehicles are not exempt. Electric vehicles are not exempt, classic vehicles are not exempt.
The only exemption being discussed is an exemption for low income people. Spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Randy Rentschler, said "I don't want to say it's a pie in the sky".
"A VMT" (vehicle miles traveled), "charge is really an option for the future to be looked at and considered" Rentschler said.
A public outcry on this issue is sure to come. Consider the invasion of privacy issue with the GPS type monitoring. Tracking every mile one drives. Divorce lawyers will be subpoenaing the records.
I have not looked into the Metropolitan transportation Commission to see what makes it tic. It is beginning to smell like the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, (BAAQMD).
The Board of Directors of the BAAQMD is simply a group of professional rubber stampers. They rubber stamp everything the air quality engineers set in front of them.
They (the BAAQMD Board), do not bring anything to the table that would enable them to ask an intelligent question on an issue placed before them. They just sign off on it.
So now we have the Metropolitan Transportation Commission coming out with this outrageous ten cents per mile driven tax proposal.
Some of these Ad Hoc government bureaucracies simply have nothing better to do to justify their existance. We would all be better off if these Ad Hoc government bureaucracies were simply disolved.
We have the BAAQMD telling us when we can burn or cannot burn in our fire places on the one hand. On the other hand their monitoring stations in the nine Bay Area Counties cannot determine if a sampled carbon is fossil carbon or wood carbon.
So they just prohibit fire place burning. The reality is, the Bay Area highest polluters are the automotive emission by drivers of vehicles.
So now the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is floating a ten cent per mile tax on all miles driven.
The next target for taxation will be the water we use in our homes for cooking, hygiene and cleaning. There is no end to it.
All these agencies are eliminating our freedom, attempting to tax our freedoms twice with the driving tax as we already pay gas tax at the pump when we purchase gas.
