Obama Wants To Tax Everyone Just For Driving. By The Mile.

We all know that rich people are bad by definition according to the tenets of liberalism.

What also needs to be realized is that people who drive – no matter how poor they are or how much they need to drive – are also bad people by the same tenets of liberalism.

And bad people should be punished.

Obama administration floats draft plan to tax cars by the mile
By Pete Kasperowicz – 05/05/11 07:45 AM ET

The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.

The plan is a part of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act, an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly.

The White House, however, said the bill is only an early draft that was not formally circulated within the administration.

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

March Congressional Budget Office report that supported the idea of taxing drivers based on miles driven.

Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations.

The CBO report was requested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has proposed taxing cars by the mile as a way to increase federal highway revenues.

The proposal seems to follow up on that idea in section 2218 of the draft bill. That section would create, within the Federal Highway Administration, a Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office. It would be tasked with creating a “study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems.”

The department seemed to be aware of the need to prepare the public for what would likely be a controversial change to the way highway funds are collected. For example, the office is called on to serve a public-relations function, as the draft says it should “increase public awareness regarding the need for an alternative funding source for surface transportation programs and provide information on possible approaches.”

The draft bill says the “study framework” for the project and a public awareness communications plan should be established within two years of creating the office, and that field tests should begin within four years.

The office would be required to consider four factors in field trials: the capability of states to enforce payment, the reliability of technology, administrative costs and “user acceptance.” The draft does not specify where field trials should begin.

The new office would be funded a total of $300 million through fiscal 2017 for the project.

This story was updated at 10:17 a.m.

The obvious reason liberals give for thinking that people who drive are bad is environmentalism.  If you drive, you are guilty of helping to murder the planet.  And – as the utterly looney-leftist United Nations wants you to understand – the planet should have more rights than you.

What the left doesn’t say is that the above is a pretense, not their real reason (although it clearly is the primary reason for the useful idiots who make up much of the environmentalist movement).  The real reason is control: the left wants to have near total control of how you live your life.  And the freedom to drive where you want to is a major obstacle to the type of control the left wants.

To quote one Democrat John Dingell regarding socialized health care –

Let me remind you this has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

– is pretty much to quote them all on pretty much anything.  What they really want is “to control the people.”

Right now, you can buy a car, fill it with gas, and drive wherever you want to go.  That’s just wrong to Democrats.  You shouldn’t be able to do that.  You should have to travel the way they want you to travel.  To the extent you should even be allowed to drive at all, you should only be able to drive the type of vehicle THEY want you to drive.  And there should be a tracking device so they can track where you’ve been.  And, of course, ultimately, you shouldn’t BE allowed to drive.  It’s too much freedom.  You should have to use public transportation.

It’s really not an accusation; it is simply a FACT that fascist Democrats want to take away your freedom, take away your car, monitor where you’ve been by installing tracking equipment and tax you into extinction.

And the easiest way for totalitarians – I mean liberals – to do that is to make gas so expensive that the unwashed masses simply can’t afford it.  Which goes along with making the sacred “green” cars too expensive for most families to be able to afford.

So you’ve got Obama on the record telling a journalist that he doesn’t care if the price of gas goes way up; he just doesn’t want it to happen too quickly and make us angry.

You’ve got the man Obama handpicked for his energy secretary on the record saying, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”  When of course gas prices in Europe are easily double ours in Amerca.

And you’ve got Obama doing everything he can to keep America from being able to drill for its own oil.

Meanwhile, Obama’s response to shockingly high gas prices has been to demonize oil companies and decry their profits.  When what’s funny about that is that 1) oil companies make about 7 cents per gallon in profit, versus Obama’s government which makes about 44 cents in “profit” per gallon (with state governments gouging for even more “profit”).  And 2) by taking away tax breaks that ALL U.S. companies get, what Obama is really demanding is that Americans pay even MORE for their gasoline – because ALL TAXES ON CORPORATIONS SIMPLY GET PASSED ON TO CUSTOMERS IN THE FORM OF HIGHER PRICES.

Obama is not only basically saying, “Screw you, America!”  He’s saying that Americans are simply too stupid to even understand that they are getting screwed.

Meet Michelle Obama, Mass-Murdering Liberal

Let’s start out with the story as told by uberlib Kate Sheppard:

A new report from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association is getting lots of press today because some reporters, rather bizarrely, have tried to blame the increase in pedestrian deaths in 2010 on First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.

Yes, you read that right. See the original piece in The Examiner and the followup in the Daily Caller.

The reporters in question posit that perhaps the increase in the number of pedestrians struck by cars last year, after four years of decline, is because people are out exercising more, choosing to walk when possible instead of hopping in the car. TBD has a good post in which the GHSA’s executive director, Barbara Harsha, explaining that she never said that at all. The group isn’t sure exactly what caused the uptick in deaths—and they certainly can’t pin it on Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative.

Now, do I think for a single second that Michelle Obama’s initiative should be blamed for the spike in pedestrian deaths?

No.

Then again, I don’t think like a liberal.

Sarah Palin got widely blamed for Jared Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and many others in Tucson Arizona for no other reason than that she had a map that “targeted” vulnerable Democrats – Giffords included – for political defeat.

It wasn’t just the far-left that did this; even supposed “mainstream” journalists were all over themselves denouncing Sarah Palin for her inciting violence.

They didn’t really give a damn that Democrats themselves routinely used the same sort of maps to “target” Republicans:

Nor did they think it worthwhile to mention that Bob Beckel – the Democrat strategist who ran Walter Mondale’s campaign – claimed that he invented “targeting” maps.  And that, therefore, the worse thing Republicans did was respond to this act of hate and violence by fighting back.

Nor did they decide it was worthwhile to mention the fact that not only did a leftwing group “target” Gabrielle Giffords for defeat because she wasn’t liberal enough for them, but they actually used the word “dead” in reference to her:

The website Daily Kos has also deleted a diary about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords entitled “My Congresswoman Voted Against Pelosi, Now She’s Dead To Me,” but so far has not deleted a post by founder Markos Moulitsas that lists Giffords’ district among those on their “target list,” and noted that “Not all of these people will get or even deserve primaries, but this vote certainly puts a bulls eye on their district.”

We have since learned that there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between Sarah Palin and anything that Sarah Palin said or did or posted and Tucson gunman Jared Loughner.

But that didn’t stop the rabid left, did it?

But allow me to think like a liberal, for a second…

Okay, I’m back from the sudden urge to vomit that overcame me.  My stomach is now as devoid of its contents as my mind of rationality.  I now return to my experiment of thinking like a liberal.

If we apply the left’s “guilty until proven innocent” tactic on Michelle Obama, where do we end up?

With all due respect, there is FAR more evidence linking Michelle Obama to the traffic deaths of pedestrians (after all, she did encourage people to get out there and walk, and she should have known that many people who were stupid enough to take advice from her in the first place would be too stupid to survive an encounter with the real world).

It seems obvious that, applying liberal methodology, we should immediately brand Michelle Obama a mass-murderer.  And we should continue to denounce her until we do a study and determine that every single pedestrian killed had never once heard her instruction to “move.”

And, of course, if so much as one pedestrian causality ever heard Michelle Obama say “let’s move,” then obviously Michelle Obama as much as killed that poor victim.

And all we need to condemn Michelle Obama for her “Let’s Murder” initiative is to apply the same standard that the left applied to Sarah Palin.