In My Car? I Don't Think So 

My sisters are all convinced that some day I'll move back to California... but then I see stuff like this... and it gives me 34th thoughts:

Officials in car-clogged California are so worried they may be considering a replacement for the gas tax altogether, replacing it with something called "tax by the mile."

Seeing tax dollars dwindling, neighboring Oregon has already started road testing the idea.

"Drivers will get charged for how many miles they use the roads, and it's as simple as that," says engineer David Kim.

Kim and his team at Oregon State University equipped a test car with a global positioning device to keep track of its mileage. Eventually, every car would need one.

Sure... today it's just for a per mile tax. Tomorrow insurance companies will be taking advantage of the fact that you have to have them by law and start insuring people that way. Then police will be using those to enforce all sorts of moving violations... and lets not forget government using GPS to track you for one reason or another. I wrote on this sort of thing earlier.

What's funny is that the article talks about replacing the gas tax with a per mile tax. When was the last time you heard of a government body replacing a tax with anything? I can just imagine the debate in the California legislature now. We can't fully abolish the gas tax... otherwise people from other states driving into California won't be paying their fair share either. But we still want our per mile tax too.

And then there is this little tidbit from San Francisco:

San Francisco would become the first city in the nation to charge drivers just for driving in its chronically congested downtown under a sure-to-be controversial proposal being aired today.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, chair of the San Francisco Transportation Authority, will ask the agency to study a downtown toll zone -- whereby drivers would need to purchase a daily pass to drive in The City's most congested streets -- as a potential solution to the Municipal Transportation Agency's woeful budget problems.

Thanks to VodkaPundit for both the links... and this extra bit of commentary:

California is considering a per-mile-driven car tax, to make up for the shortfall in gas-tax revenue caused by hybrid vehicles. Thing is, California already has a per-mile car tax in place: It's called the gas tax.
...
And the best part for environmentally-conscious folks like the California legislature, the current tax is quite progressive. The more gas you use and the more the harm you cause to the environment, the more you pay.

What California's Democrats are now considering is: Each driver would pay a fixed amount per mile driven, no matter if he's behind the wheel of a 50-MPG hybrid or a gas-guzzling Hummer H1.

Who'd have thunk Democrats would have become such fans of an evil, regressive flat tax?

Who'd have thunk indeed.