White House disowns plan to tax car mileage

The USA government should be rejoicing. The high fuel prices are forcing Americans to either buy smaller fuel-efficient cars or reduce their car usage. The Climate-Change believers in the WH should be cheering that the environment is finally winning. Instead, the Obama regime is trying to think of ways to impose a new tax-per-mile because they aren't sucking enough fuel taxes out of the people. This would require spending money on a satellite system that would track your every mile and then they'd send you a tax bill for your miles driven! How's that for being industrious? You see, this is what I don't understand. Global-warming believing governments want to increase our energy bills to stop us warming the earth by making it unaffordable to switch on our lights, or to cook our dinner. Yet, when the usage drops, the prices rise to make up for the revenue short-fall. So, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't and losing all the way. Back at the ranch, these same governments are ever-expanding and spending like drunken sailors.....

The White House on Thursday walked back a proposal to tax people based on how many miles they drive.

The proposal was included in a draft of the administration's Transportation Opportunities Act, but a White House spokesman said it "was not an administration proposal."

"This is not a bill supported by the administration," White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said. "This was an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration, does not take into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”

The legislation the White House is distancing itself from calls for creating a Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office within the Federal Highway Administration. It would be tasked with creating a "study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems."

House Transportation Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has indicated that he did not think a tax-per-mile proposal was politically palatable, but said Congress would have to look for ways to supplement declining gas tax revenues.

Increasingly energy efficient cars are generating less money, Mica said in a 2009 interview with The West Volusia Beacon in his home state.

"Even an increase in gas taxes now will not solve the problem,” Mica said. "Every day, the fleet is getting more efficient. They’re literally driving further and paying less, so the system will collapse.”

But even before Republicans took control of the House in 2010 on an anti-government wave, Mica said the tax-per-mile proposal would be a tough sell to voters.

“They’ll be coming with pitchforks up the Capitol steps,” Mica told the newspaper.

Mica's office did not immediately return requests for comment Thursday.

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