The Biden scheme to tax you for going to work or the grocery store

 Monica Showalter:

Joe Biden's transportation secretary nominee, Pete Buttigieg, was all over the map at his confirmation hearings.

According to MarketWatch, emphasis mine:

Speaking at his confirmation hearing with his husband sitting nearby, Buttigieg pointed to a "generational opportunity" to create new jobs, fight economic inequality and stem climate change. Often sidestepping specifics, Buttigieg hinted at a broad climate-centric role for the department that will require significant investments, on top of Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan.

"We need to build our economy back, better than ever, and the Department of Transportation can play a central role in this," the 39-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, told the Senate Commerce Committee.

He indicated he would reverse a Trump administration rollback in federal automotive fuel economy standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, work to stiffen oversight of aviation safety as the troubled Boeing 737 Max makes its return to the skies and encourage use of electric vehicles, such as by adding a half-million charging stations nationwide.

Buttigieg did not specify where money could come from for big investments in infrastructure, and wouldn't rule out a tax increase. He floated the possibility of a major change in how highways are funded, such as by converting from the current Highway Trust Fund, which is paid for through the gas tax, to a "vehicle miles traveled" alternative that would tax drivers based on their road mileage.

According to the account of the same hearings by Roll Call, which seemed to be on damage control duty for the Biden administration, Buttigieg's people walked the tax talk back, but not exactly.  The record of the hearing seems to be the reality.

Two things stand out: Buttigieg wants a tax hike for gasoline to fund his so-called infrastructure projects.  Who will pay those taxes?  Those who drive.  And if someone needs to drive a lot, such as an independent truck-driver or a low-wage service worker who can't afford to live in the blue city center, but instead makes due with a commute on the outskirts of town, the tax becomes regressive.  The tax is the same for the rich or poor, and maybe the rich can afford it.  But the poor live on a low margin — the tax will likely cut to the bone for the poor, forcing them to go without, say, in food supplies or other necessities.  Tax hikes that are the same and unavoidably hit the poor the hardest.

The hearing also notes that Buttigieg likes the Big Brother solution, to tax people based on miles driven.  Besides being amazingly intrusive, hooking worker cars up like guinea pigs to the meters, it's also another big regressive tax that will hit the poor hardest.  See, those wicked, wicked poor, out in places like Sun Valley and Lancaster, commuting to a job to downtown Los Angeles because they can't afford the L.A. rents, really should be paying more for the privilege of driving several hours to work and living out in the sticks. And don't imagine that buses are practical with those huge distances.  L.A. is spread out, quite unlike Manhattan.  And this isn't just the poor, but the middle class, the people who are able to buy homes in West Covina, Cerritos, or Lake Elsinore, but not Midtown or Culver City.  Hollywood movie stars and hedge fund managers who live in Santa Monica or the Hollywood Hills won't feel a thing, but too bad about the guys coming in to serve them from Ontario, San Dimas, and Pacoima.

And as a side note, these regressive tax hikes for so-called infrastructure projects will likely be the kind that never happen, because if experience is any indicator, the funds will get diverted to other leftist priorities, which don't include quality of life for the general public.  That, in any case, is what happened in the tax-for-infrastructure deal over in the Biden administration's model state of California.  The taxpayers got nothing in the way of promised infrastructure repairs for their tax hike.  The money just went to hobby-horse greenie projects.  I wrote about that here.

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Democrats are energy idiots who use global warming as an excuse to tax you and ruin your life.  They want to make America into California, the state that people are leaving by the millions because all this big green crap makes it an intolerable place to make a living or keep the lights on.  

BTW, did Biden ever mention this was his plan during the campaign?