The mileage tax and the economics of reality

Garry Reed

Dallas Libertarian Examiner

Economic reality from the liberterrain…

The Potomac powercrats are proposing that we all be charged a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax because (surprise!) we don't pay enough at the pump to finance highway infrastructure.

This would require that all highway vehicles be equipped with onboard trackers that record everyone's mileage and (coincidentally?) pinpoint our whereabouts at all times.

Texas has its own VMT version in the works. State Senator John Carona of Dallas thought VMT was "an interesting idea."

While Melissa Pehle-Hill at the Dallas Congress Examiner offered a good overview on the new intrusive money-grab there are a few other considerations that immediately leap to mind for libertarians:

1. Vanishing Vacations

VMT will destroy the leisure industry. Hotels, motels, restaurants, theme parks, movie theaters will dry up and blow away because nobody can afford to drive anymore.

And everyone will be calculating the most direct route to the nearest big box discount store where everything can be bought in a single trip. Sorry Mom & Pop, if you’re not on the direct route you’re screwed.

2. Everything travels by highway

Every product in every store got there via wheeled vehicles on highways. All prices will increase to reflect the VMT costs. And that's before Texans pay the 8.25% sales tax at checkout. That means its time to start looking for...

3. Black markets for everything

Like untaxed gasoline. The political classes learned nothing from doubling and tripling cigarette taxes. The higher the tobacco tax went the more people bought from the black market (or free market as libertarians rightly call it.)

Entrepreneurs with eighteen-wheelers smuggled (i.e., supplied) cartons from the tobacco producing states into New England and Canadian cities. Free-lancers sold smokes without tax stamps by word of mouth directly from their vehicles at a profit for themselves but cheaper than the taxed product.

Now start imaging gypsy gasoline trucks or fly-by-night gas peddlers set up in abandoned gas stations for two or three days who move on before the gov goons catch on.

What better way to teach people real economics than thriving black markets on everything?

4. Reality

The powercrats always spend two or three million taxbucks for every one million they skin from our hides, so they'll forever keep coming up with more ways to skin us alive.

And people will forever keep finding new ways to skin them right back.

That's real economics.

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