White House: LaHood So Crazy
Shortly after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood expressed his enthusiasm for a nationwide pay-per-mile tax scheme, the White House reacted by denying any plans for the car-monitoring fee system. “[Pay-per-mile] is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the WaPo at a press conference, kicking off a merry little game of gotcha. “So was Secretary LaHood speaking out of turn here?” an AP reporter asked at the briefing. “I would direct you to Secretary LaHood on that,” Gibbs said. “Well, we actually interviewed him,” the reporter noted. “Well, call him back,” Gibbs said. Transportation Department officials later “clarified” that LaHood’s comments “were part of a long interview about a range of transportation issues and that he never specifically advocated taxing drivers by the mile.” Well that clears everything up now, doesn’t it?
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Maybe Mr. La Hood's next idea will be to then tax us by the KM....when we go metric here in the states. At our current rate of conversion, this will be long past Obama's time. Of course, here in Texas the GOP still rules the state (House, Senate and Governor) so until recently the mantra was "toll it, sell it, or don't build it" but this has run afoul of citizen protests, especially in the Austin area which added 4 tollways in 4 years and had plans to build tolled lanes on currently free roads until people brought pitchforks to the politicians....The "Good Hair" governor (Molly Ivins' nickname for Perry - more hair than Blago) even saw his dream of the Trans-Texas Corridor, with it's humongous swath of Right-of-Way to be sold to Austailian-Sapnish concerns derailed to an extent. The only idea on these highways that garnered some excitement was a clause that paid the state more money if the speed limit was higher - they even built into the one road contract approved for this a clause to permit speeds up to 85 MPH. That part of the highway (SH 130 from Lockhart to Seguin) is just now being started, so it will be a couple of years before see if they really will go that high with the limit. There is a plan to raise the gas tax amongst many ideas in our current legislature for paying for roads that will probably fail, leaving us further behind in catching up in infrastructure. Austin is not that large of a city, but with the NAFTA truck traffic and only one main expressway that is toll-free going between Dallas and Mexico we ended up with 4 of the 100 worst traffic jams in the country list this week. Hopefully some of the bailout funds come south to help with these things, but it will probably be a long time before it does us any good, if ever.
RAy Lahood is of Lebanese decent, and this being the fact, he was invited in 2004 to my university graduation to give a speech. a hlaf hour speech about civility and how people should deal with it.'half the student body fell asleep on their chairs and so did the people attending the ceremony. he buggered off right after he finished his speech. now he was then suposedly an expert on civilization and sociological things of that nature, what the hell brought him on to be the Transport Minister in the US of A? anyway for the main subject, i think pay per mile is as stupid as it gets in terms of taxing personal transport. dont they already do that by taxing fuel? the more you drive the more you pay? i think it should be the opposite, if you drive more than 20 miles a day then you get tax cuts on the fuel.... Americans already pay way too much taxes to be taxed on an already taxed task, (did you get your tongue in a twist?) just wondering, since the government (people) is lending ompanies like gm money, and will in the future take it back from the people themselves (eventually)as well as Gm. why dont they stop all taxes paid on everthing and i mean everything for a year or so, sustain themselves on loan, then a year or so later, when people have injected enough cash back into the economy (minus tax) they can start taxing again to cover government running cost plus 5% extra to cover the loan they took to cover themselves over the 12 to 18 month of tax free operation. i know i'm off base but what the hell....
Random pic caption: "You gotta play 'em like little violins..."
@bigbaffoon Immaterial is an accounting term, and yes it essentially means just that; I tend to use accounting terms, as that is my profession. It's costing the average American $100 per? What does that mean exactly? We're already in quite a deficit, so that figure seems pretty arbitrary. You paid $2.7 million in taxes? That's outrageous, but if you're paying that much then you must be making quite a bit more than the average American. For someone who's an apparent millionaire, I'd think that you might understand basic grammar. Personally, no, I haven't given that much in taxes-but my family has lost a son defending the country, for what its worth. So tell me-what exactly is the point of all this?