California’s latest scam tax to take money from its residents is essentially a subscription service that bills you every month for how often you drive a car.
California Democrats, the personification of incompetence, have a two-pronged problem: The state wants to pay for road maintenance through an ever-increasing gas tax at the same time as it tries to force people to buy electric vehicles. Having finally realized the contradiction there, California is now planning to release the findings of a new pilot program, which charges drivers a tax per mile they drive. To spoil the conclusion of this saga for you, California will almost certainly recommend adopting this program statewide, because taxing Californians into the dirt is what the state does best.
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The program, as constructed, is essentially a subscription service that requires you to self-report your usage. Californians will have to report their mileage and be billed per mile every month. KMPH 26 broke down a possible hypothetical as follows: “If you live in Hanford and commute to and from Fresno 5 days a week with a Toyota Camry, you would have to pay just over $11 if the road tax is 3 cents.” That is $11 per week for your job if you commute about 40 minutes to work every day, not counting any other additional drives you may make. That would amount to about $44 per month. A Netflix subscription right now could cost you about $8 per month, for comparison.
The result is a tax primarily on rural Californians, who must commute further to work, school, grocery stores, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, or relatives’ houses. These are the same rural communities being destroyed by California’s water regulations and EV mandates with insufficient EV infrastructure.
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Moreover, it is entirely unnecessary. California does not need to bill drivers monthly to use the state’s roads, and it doesn’t need the highest gas tax in the nation either. California jacked up the gas tax in 2017, arguing that the money was needed to maintain the state’s roads. That year, the state had a budget of $179.5 billion, and yet California Democrats waste so much money on giveaways for illegal immigrants and fraudulent or failing homelessness programs that they decided they needed even more money to fund roads, one of the only things a state government should be expected to fund.
California’s budget has since ballooned to $325 billion, and yet Democrats demand more money for the most basic function of government: building and maintaining roads. The result is a per-mile tax that will inevitably increase, as the gas tax did, requiring taxpayers to pay every month for the privilege of using state roads.
