BY: NCVIKING

Building upon a disturbing idea born in my lovely home state of North Carolina, Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood suggests the administration would roll out a similar mileage tax on the nation. The mileage tax idea would be a colossal infringement on privacy using scary Big Brother-like satellites tracking and taxing your every move. Obama then had his minion Gibbs toss him under the bus yesterday stating: “It is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration.”

Here is more from Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com:

LaHood apparently didn’t check with Obama before shooting off his mouth. It’s another amateurish stumble after Steven Chu’s sudden discovery that energy policy falls under his aegis as … Secretary of Energy.

The mileage tax as a replacement for the gas tax is a bad idea on several levels. First, collection of the gas tax is relatively easy and uncomplicated; it’s levied at the pump and requires no particular compliance for tens of millions of drivers nationwide. It costs the federal government very little to collect and its enforcement is limited to the much lower number of fuel stations, rather than all of the drivers and autos in the US.

LaHood’s suggestion would be an enforcement and logistical nightmare. A mileage tax would require the installation of GPS equipment on every motor vehicle and an enforcement bureaucracy to ensure that drivers didn’t disable it. The cost of the devices would run to the billions just on the initial rollout. The Obama administration would have to spend more millions, if not billions, tracking the mileage on all of these cars.

The privacy implications are the worst aspect of the idea. The government would have a database tracking all of our movements, at least those made in personal vehicles, for their use. At the end of the year, when we had to account for this tax, we would have no practical way of challenging the government data on which we’d be taxed. Can you imagine having to produce a record of every single car trip you took in 2008 for an audit? The tax burden would only come at the end of the year, in a balloon payment.

The wonder of this isn’t that the White House rebuked its own Transportation Secretary. The wonder of this is that LaHood didn’t get canned.

OUCH!

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