Do you want the government to know everywhere you drive? And at your expense?
Congress has recently been debating how to get money for the failing Highway Trust Fund. One of their solutions is installing event data recorders, known as a black box, in every car to keep track of mileage so they can tax per mile. A similar proposal will become reality in Oregon in 2015, the first state to impose such a tax, according to Fox News.
The HTF is currently funded by a federal fuel tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. This new black box tax is needed because according to the Congressional Research Service, the fuel tax isn’t bringing in as much money as it used to. The slow economy is causing people to buy less of the high-priced commodity, and people are buying more fuel-efficient cars.
High gas prices are already putting the pinch on travel, and this new tax will only make it harder.
Many people live far away from their work, schools, grocery stores, and churches, so they have to drive. If people have to pay more per mile, travel for luxury will be cut out of their routines and places like restaurants, movie theaters, and sporting events will suffer.
The politicians pushing this tax in Congress would be more than happy to make driving more difficult to decrease emissions. They fail to realize that preventing traveling will not only harm local businesses, but also tourist-driven cities and regions, such as Northern Michigan.
This past summer, Main Street shops in downtown Petoskey, Mich. struggled because of soaring gas prices, PetoskeyNews.com reported. Michigan’s gas prices averaged $4.215 per gallon this summer, which is only $0.04 lower than the all-time highest gas price ever seen in the state, AAA Michigan found. As the article explained, these downtown shops “depend on summer sales to bring in a big chunk of their yearly profits.” So how will shops in these regions survive economically when there are even more taxes on traveling? People will be more content with watching a bonfire on their iPad rather than going Up North. They won’t stop at restaurants or malls on the drive up, they won’t pay for a hotel room, they won’t drive to get coffee at the cute little café for breakfast, and they won’t support the local town’s summer festivals.
A way to get around paying this tax would be using public transportation, but only people in urban areas have access to it, and they live in the vicinity of places they need to travel to. It’s the people who live far away from their churches and work and schools who will suffer the most because they drive more miles.
Black boxes were first installed in cars in the mid-1990s, and today, they record the events of about 150 million vehicles on the road. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 96 percent of all new cars made this year now sport the boxes.
These black boxes are just another way of government acting as big brother, infringing on people’s privacy by acting as a GPS system that tracks people’s whereabouts.
Both sides of the political spectrum think that black boxes encroach on citizens’ rights. The Tea Party conservatives and the American Civil Liberties Union are against them. The fact that these two are agreeing on something should be a neon yellow “duh, this is wrong” sign to the legislatures .
The NHTSA states that black boxes help public safety, but how? The black box is used to reconstruct accidents. Reconstruction just puts the pieces of an accident back together but has little to do with accident prevention.
The best way to fix the Highway Trust Fund’s problems is to simply do away with it. Privatize roads instead. The government has proven itself incapable of managing our nation’s roads. Further punishing the consumer with another tax because the government has failed is absurd.
Ultimately, the black box brings us one step closer to the 1966 Beatles song “Taxman:”
“If you drive a car/I’ll tax the street.”