The New Gas Tax By Another Name

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One of the ways that gas taxes will be increased is by not calling them that. It goes down easier – like the “shared responsibility payment” you’re forced to pay for not paying the health insurance mafia for an Obamacare policy you don’t want to buy.

Instead, the new gas taxes will be called carbon taxes – which makes it easier to shame-silence objections to them. This is an important tactical consideration for the Left especially because gas taxes are already the most regressive taxes on a necessity extant. Only a handful of things – like cigarettes – are taxed more punitively and disproportionately.

But most people don’t smoke – and no one has to. 

Driving is different – even if you don’t. Because someone else has to. Like the guy who drives the truck that brings your food to the store and practically everything else you need to live.

The delivery cost of which is reflected in the cost to you.

Plus the cost of making what’s delivered – almost all of which involves energy and almost all of that involves gasoline.

An increase in gas taxes – technically, motor fuels taxes, encompassing diesel fuel as well as gasoline –  is therefore a hard sell, politically, when you’re a politician posturing as a “progressive.” Like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for instance – who is now fief underlord of the president selected by the Left to lord it over the entire country.

He wants a gas tax – but got his chain yanked recently for saying so. So it is necessary to say something else.

Both men want to make it more expensive to drive; in particular, to drive anything with a gasoline or diesel engine – in order to make driving something with a motor (i.e., an electric car) seem more “affordable” and also to just punish those who “cling” to their non-electric cars, which are “bad for the climate” but actually bad for them in that they are harder to exert control over.

But adding 50 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas that already has about 50 cents of federal/state/local taxes folded into its per gallon cost of about $2.20 – amounting to a tax of about 25 percent, a rate comparable to the usury some credit card companies apply to the people least able to afford credit – creates bad visuals for the party that likes to pretend it is the party of the Average Guy.

Which of course it isn’t – and hasn’t been for at least 20 years. It is now the party of the Urban Hip and Woke, most of whom live in apartments and don’t care about the cost of fuel because their government jobs or – government checks – enable them to not have to care about it.

That is why the coming gas tax will probably be marketed as a carbon tax. It will be easier to sell it this way because it will be harder for gaslit, virtue-signalers on the Left and the Right to object to their own impoverishment.

After all, the climate crisis demands it.

The people who closed the doors to their own businesses would never have done so in the name of giving Wal-Mart and Amazon their business. But they did it – willingly, many of them – when their economic selbstmorde was sold as virtuous. Many are still militantly thrusting the katana into their own guts for the sake of showing how much they care.

And of course, it will be hard for the Poltroon Party – i.e., the Republican Party, which either has no principles it is willing to defend or is too afraid to defend them if the defending results in recriminations about lack of virtue ululating from Leftists – to raise any objection, since it agrees with the theology of climate change as it agrees with the Cult of the Holy Facial Codpiece.

Expect no pushback from the GOP.

So, what to expect?

There is already a carbon tax on motor fuels in Canada, implemented under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act – which will be as hard to object to as the Patriot Act, for Republicans especially.

Anyhow, the tax initially applied $20 per metric ton and will reach $50 per metric ton by next year (2022) which will amount to a tax of 42 cents per gallon on motor fuels – without actually calling it a tax increase on motor fuels.   

And that’s just for openers. To achieve the “ambitious targets” the president selected has already decided we’ll pay for under the terms of the Paris Climate Accords he just made us all a party to again (the Orange Fail had pulled the U.S. out of these Accords – but his failure to do anything to prevent the weaponization of hypochondria undid all that and everything else he did, too).

It is estimated that it will cost us at least twice what Canada’s $50 per metric ton carbon tax costs Canadians to meet the “ambitious targets” of the Accord. Probably more – for the same reason that it always takes more lockdowns, “masking” and Needling to “stop the spread” of the virus, the curve of which never flattens.

At $100 per metric ton, we’d be paying at least $3.20 for a gallon of gas – most of which would be tax. But it’ll likely be more than that given the president selected’s intention to also reduce the supply of gas (via the supply of oil) and thus increase its cost via artificially increased scarcity.

Which will be marketed as “necessary” to achieve those “ambitious targets” laid down by people like Buttigieg and Biden, who have no worries about the cost of gas or anything else because of their infinite ability to force us to pay them to fleece us.

. . . .

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70 COMMENTS

  1. Hey Shadow, I’ve never seen one of these batteries that run these electric cars, but I hear that they’re pretty big. When I was a kid working in a garage we had one of those little lead acid batteries explode. After that happened, everyone started wearing safety glasses, and leaving the hood down if nobody was working on a car. I’ve got batteries on a boat that I have to constantly keep the fluid levels up on and it’s not just an annoying pain, but there’s a little PTSD playing into it as well. There is so much wrong about these things it boggles the mind. Then again, there’s a retirement community 20 miles away that is packed full of people ripping around in golf carts all day long. It’s a retirement community that spans three counties, and has something like a dozen golf courses. It’s Disneyland for retirees. Some of these golf carts can really move too. I don’t know what they’ve done to them, but they can get those things flying down the road. I suspect that they will get those Teslas to stop blowing or catching fire eventually. They don’t bother me because the more people who are driving electric cars, the cheaper gas should become.

    • I admit, Shnarkle, I have never seen an electric car battery. Based on what I have read about such vehicles, though, they seem to be more a pain (and cost) than they are worth? Not to mention given where I live, we have this saying that “there is no such thing as a short trip”. So driving to the nearest city (400 miles away) is just not realistic with an electric vehicle. You can drive for miles, and still be nowhere, so there is also the safety aspects involved, too, of getting stranded out in no-man’s land. As for the cheaper gas? Normally, I would agree with you on that point. However, with “Joe and the Hoe” being in charge, I sadly, have to agree with the one guy at the Chevron station, that figured we will have $4 dollar a gallon gas by July. Electric cars sound great~~~~in theory. Might want to keep that fire extinguisher handy, though, until they get those bugs worked out. I got a good laugh (and picture in my head) of the old folks ripping around in their golf carts on the green. They can catch up with the squirrels on the green, maybe. In a note of irony, they probably cannot drive any better than me on the road-ha ha ha!

    • Hi Schnarkle,

      I have seen them. Full-cut aways, in person. The battery pack generally takes up and is spread over the entirety of the car’s floorpan. A Tesla Model 3’s battery pack weighs 1,000 pounds – more than a fully-dressed big block Chevy V8 (cast iron, not a modern alloy V8).

  2. Living in New England and we get many large snow storms. And it takes large trucks mostly diesel powered trucks to plow roads parking lots and driveways. How do they plan on doing this now? Put a plow on a electric car or truck? I have a feeling thats not gonna work….

  3. Heh.. you just described Seattle and portland.

    “ Which of course it isn’t – and hasn’t been for at least 20 years. It is now the party of the Urban Hip and Woke, most of whom live in apartments and don’t care about the cost of fuel because their government jobs or – government checks – enable them to not have to care about it.”

    Fact

    • Hi Dipshift,

      Yup. I used to live in Northern Va – styled the “Beltway” in reference to everything being centered on DC. A very affluent area where almost everyone is a government worker or works for a business that does business with the government. Naturally, it is an area that votes overwhelmingly for government.

  4. The bottom line is that Dr. Gates, fully backed by his Cracker Jack box founded degrees in medical science, energy, computers and vaccines, demands ZERO CO2 on “his” planet. That means no fossil fueled vehicles. That means taxes on oil and gas going up beyond anything imaginable and will result in the total destruction of the oil and gas industries. And the face diaper worshiping masses will gladly accept these dictates.

    Dr. Gates already controls Big Pharma which controls the FDA, AMA and the CDC. He also controls WHO and the UN. He controls numerous media outlets. He also now owns the most farmland in the USA of any entity and continues to buy it up as if it was free. But in his favor is his 66,000 square foot super mansion in Washington that I am sure emits not one speck or particle of CO2.

    We have the four Headless Horseman of the Apocalypse staring us in the face: A fake pandemic, fake vaccines, fake global warming and a fake news media. Truth resides on some other lonely planet where Communism hasn’t yet contaminated it…I think it’s called Pluto. Yes, I still consider Pluto a planet
    despite what the experts say. In fact, I no longer believe any experts who claim to be such. Thanks Eric.

    • And did you see, Tom, where Gates is now the largest land holder in the U.S? He now owns 268,000 acres of land. landreport.com shows how much land he owns in each state, including middle America, which is traditionally farm land. You cannot help but wonder what the evil bastard is up to, because you know it is nothing good.

      • Hi Shadow,

        I despise Gates as well but think his land-buying has more to do with protecting his wealth against the impending devaluation of cash. Land is a tangible value and can serve as a store of value. Buy 100 acres – or 268,000 – and you have probably secured the current cash value equivalent and perhaps will make money on the swap. And if the value of cash plummets, you will still have the value of the land.

  5. I just noticed that there are these Tesla charging stations popping up all over the place, and even more striking is that whenever I see them, they’re almost always full of cars parked getting recharged. They say you can now go 400 miles on a charge and they’re supposed to last a million miles. I’ll never buy one, but if that’s true, it’s impressive, and probably going to sway a lot of people who are tired of paying carbon taxes.

    • What I found ironic, Shnarkle, is that these same charging stations were shut down in California when one of their many fires started, making it impossible for those that “went green” to recharge their electric vehicles. In essence, stranding these said “woke drivers” when the charge only took them so far. Whoops. It was really too bad (insert sarcasm) that those big, bad gas guzzling vehicles were the ones that could actually get somewhere to safety.

  6. I read somewhere that the price of cars and fuel in Brazil seems to be decided by Greenpeace; it’s sad but true.
    A gallon of what passes for gas (1/4 of it is ethanol) here costs US$4. A new Toyota Corolla costs US$26,500, and it’s widely seen as a luxury car for very rich people (the cheapest new car one can buy here is a Fiat Mobi Easy, which costs US$6,500). The federal-mandated minimum wage is US$206, and the per capita GDP is US$1122.
    Welcome to the Third World, dear Americans. Fasten your seat belts, as it’s a rough ride.

  7. I can forgive the masses. I can’t excuse them though, for failing to realize that they are being ruled by sociopaths if not psychopaths. These mental diseases do not allow their victims to experience any normal human virtues, like sympathy, empathy, remorse, guilt, charity, etc. Sane people simply can’t comprehend there are such people whose one and only goal is satisfying their own desires at all costs. The truly pitiful part is that those who suffer these diseases are quite often very intelligent and charismatic. Government position is the ideal environment for them, which is why those positions are saturated with them. Where else can they get away with holding a gun to people’s heads and taking their property, and forcing them to jump through whatever hoops they may design?

  8. Here’s what everyone is afraid to say, 4 simple words, “throw off the yoke”. Really, just how far into the ground are the American People supposed to be hammered down. When will it be time to throw off the yoke, living in mud huts and going to sleep at night cold and hungry? Because if people wait too long to throw off the yoke, they will be forced into endless poverty making life useless beyond a struggle only to live in constant suffering with unreachable hope that one day things will change for the better. Right now, today the Godless who have taken control of our lives have no concerns about the lives of many tens of millions of Americans, much less the quality of a decent life. They are working 24/7 to get their boots on the necks of the American People. The American People can not vote their way back to prosperity, that has now been completely taking away. The simple truth is the masses need to walk away, the almighty central government is a predictable failure a lost cause that is beyond fixing. 50 cents for a carbon tax, if only we could so lucky it would stop there but that new tax is only the beginning to the Marxist road to hell.

    • At the level of tyranny we now face, there is only one option to escape it. Per Solzhenitsyn, it must be made expensive to enforce. Which will cost lives. But what value does life hold if lived in chains, on one’s knees, while starving? Not to mention the tyrants might dispose of you anyway, even if you don’t make it expensive, just because it pleases them to do so. After all, are we not “deplorable”? By current evidence, voting is irrelevant. So stop doing it. Don’t give them authority by voting at all. If only 10% or even 20% or so eligible voters voted, how could they claim their authority other than at gunpoint? Exposing what they really are, psychopathic monsters.

    • I can clearly see that I am being corralled by the government. Ten years ago I did the math, and noticed that my income had suddenly been cut by 30%. When I added in the government thugs who had no other purpose than to see how much more revenue they could glean from me, I saw the light, and retired. In my early 20’s I started living on the street. It was only supposed to be for a month or so, but in the end I spent over a decade living on the street. I learned more about throwing off the yoke of governmental oppression in those ten years than the 30 years after while working within the system itself. As long as people continue to buy or use big tech, big ag, big pharma, big media etc. they will never begin to throw off the yoke.

      • I went Galt almost 20 years ago. It seemed that everyone but me was benefiting from my labor. My standard of living didn’t change an iota.

  9. Really smart people do and say really stupid things. Their every action so far, from increasing regulations to increasing taxes, destroys wealth creation…wealth that the really smart people rely on to confiscate for their ‘Build Back Better’ schemes. Without wealth creation, there is nothing to steal, and therefore their grand plans will come to naught. We will all become poorer as they try to create their fantasy world, and fail.
    There will be a reaction by the citizens that the really smart people will not be able to control…though it is impossible to know if that reaction will be positive or negative. Rest assured the current regime will be of short duration.
    They are too smart by half.

    • Hi Ron,

      Sorry, I disagree. Really smart people don’t do really stupid things. Really stupid people do. The politicians and peons in government are not bright people. They don’t understand economics, finances, or psychology, which should be basic tenets in managing society. We are being controlled by people who couldn’t find their way out of a wet paper bag. The sad thing is most Americans continue to reelect these ticks, which does not instill much confidence that the public is any smarter than the idiots that they elect.

    • They don’t need to steal go fund their schemes. Printer go brrrrrr and for the time being it spends the same as if it were earned in a voluntary transaction by the sweat of your brow.

  10. Why is there no push back against the imposition of more tax on our transportation services ?
    Nothing is going to change until we are willing to be as violent as the current political system is. What does that mean ?
    I have noticed, time and again, and most recently on “Viva Frei Montreal” the offhand comment that “Violence is unacceptable, we must take our issues to court…”
    And in that small remark lies our problem. We have been trained to think that violence is seen only in street demonstrations, domestic behavior, and war.
    In the meantime, with the mantel of official leadership, and with the absolute backing of the MSM, government actions are undertaken that are infinitely more violent than any BLM or ANTIFA, or even predatory drone strikes. Laws and regulations are enacted, with no regard for the “consent of the governed”, that destroy the lives, families, and fortunes of MILLIONS of US.
    MILLIONS OF US !!!!
    How much violence do you want, much less can stand ?
    When does the frog jump out of the pot ?
    In our hyperfeminized world, where Brownian Motion is deified, Newton’s Third Law of Motion still operates.
    The equal but opposite reaction is inevitable.
    The violence that we are told must be avoided, already exists. It is just in the wrong hands, for now…

    PS:I hate Windows 10

    • Hi Jack,

      Everyone’s circumstances are different – and everyone has their own “line in the sand,” or so I hope!

      For me, the line is Diapering – and Needling. I will not comply. Ever. No matter what. I will do my best to avoid a confrontation but if these Freaks pursue me even to my home and refuse to leave me be, then I will resist with whatever force is necessary.

    • Windows 10 is just like every other Windows OS since XP. No significant improvement, just moving things around so you have to re-learn how to use it, in the attempt to make you think it’s better, because it’s different.
      Regarding the inevitability of violent reaction, no revolution was ever started by fat people. Hungry people, on the other hand, might get out their pitchforks, and build gallows or guillotines, and use them. Hunger and thirst are by orders of magnitude the greatest motivators of all mammals. Parents of all mammals have been known to eat their young in response to it. People suffer hunger most often because some tyrannical force has inflicted it upon them. This is a thing many if not most of us are quite aware of. “Let them eat cake” has failed to placate us on many occasions.

  11. All Congress has to do is pass an individual mandate to make you pay the carbon tax. Everybody exhales carbon dioxide with every breath taken, so you are responsible on an individual basis for carbon emissions.

    You are the problem, therefore you must pay.

    Just deduct the carbon tax from paychecks or have the Carbon Taxation division at the IRS generate an IRS form to assess the individual carbon tax.

    Easy peasy, everybody pays, no one gets hurt.

    Doesn’t matter if you own a car or a refrigerator, you are more or less wholly dependent on fossil fuels, you have to pay the carbon tax regardless.

    If you own a car and drive 15,000 miles each year, 500 gallons of gas, 25 cent gas tax increase would be only 125 dollars per car owner, just won’t be enough, but add the tax anyway.

    You exhale a kilogram of CO2 each day, 365 kilograms per year, one dollar per kilogram, 365 dollars owed to satisfy the carbon tax obligation.

    You’ll make more money that way and you can still increase fuel taxes.

    The Vampire Squid at Deep State, Inc make sure every single penny makes it back to the Swamp, a subsidiary of Engulf and Devour, Inc.

    If you make stuff up, you can always find a way to make more money. har

  12. Why is more carbon dioxide in the air considered bad? Ice core samples reveal that its concentration is near historic lows. It was three times as high sixty million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and life of all sorts was thriving (unless one of the big guys ate you).

    The entire premise of the “green” movement is based upon lies.

    • The entire Left is based on lies, and much of the Right as well. We are caught between the two. The sins of the Left are presented to us as a just and moral cause, just as those of the Right are. The green movement is just as valid as perpetual war and “national security” is. Both being directed against each and every one of us. Neither are the least bit concerned how much we suffer from them. They are quite concerned about how compliant we are, and perfectly willing to do whatever is required to make us compliant. Including disposing of the noncompliant. Americans look upon NAZI Germany and The Soviet Union as quaint eruptions of tyranny that could never happen here. Really? What’s stopping them? The only thing that ever did has been completely erased. The US Constitution has become “quaint” as well.

      • “Americans look upon NAZI Germany and The Soviet Union as quaint eruptions of tyranny that could never happen here. Really? What’s stopping them?”

        The majority believe ‘it can’t happen here’ because they are arrogant but ignorant, sanctimonious but unprincipled, two dimensional people. Without humility, curiosity and in-depth understanding, delusion rules.

        I still see crowds chanting USA! USA! USA! We are #1! Truly believing it without specifics, or context. #1 in what?, does not seem to be asked. Vapid and clueless is the new black.

  13. The perfect con, limit people’s mobility by nudging them into electric cars while de facto increasing the sales tax as the trucks will still probably be running diesel.

  14. ‘It [the D-party] is now the party of the Urban Hip and Woke.’ — EP

    Well, in a marketing sense, yes. ‘Party of the Hip and Woke’ is pitched with the same cheerful, empty sincerity as ‘Things Go Better With Coke’ — your mileage may vary.

    But beneath their shiny, shallow veneer, both wings of the welfare-warfare party feature an organization chart topped by a fossilized gerontocracy, which in turn answers to a prominent ethnic lobby that supplies about half their campaign funding, though the modus operandi of greasing palms varies.

    Unique to the D-party is the book advance scam. Publishers Simon & Schuster (the usual Irish names, wot?), for instance, are crassly buying political influence with presidential wayward son Hunter Biden’s forthcoming memoir ‘Beautiful Things.’ That’s a rather dehumanizing way to characterize his exes, don’t you think?

    A long train of D-party political personages – the Clintons, the Obamas, and now the Bidens – have been enriched to the tune of tens of millions with non-economic advances on books that can’t possibly recoup such sums. That’s how Barack and his lovely spouse Mike bought their way into Nantucket for a cool $12 million.

    Actually it’s straight-up money laundering, like imprisoned Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh selling her Healthy Holly children’s books for hundreds of thousands in return for government contracts. Simon & Schuster is merely more sophisticated in obscuring the sordid quid pro quo, which yields big benefits to its MSM owner, CBS Viacom. And as Big Jim Comey would tell you, it’s not illegal when presidents do it.

    This is not to say that all books by politicians are worthless. Want to live a large life of crime? Hillary Clinton’s ‘Masters of Grift’ will teach you all the ins and outs of depraved predation. And in Bill Clinton’s immortal ‘How to Become a Gigolo,’ hope springs eternal that long-suffering men may actually get paid for their conjugal labors of love. /s

  15. Sounds like a good time for massive, decentralized, “carbon-neutral” hydrocarbon production. Hit them from the flank where they’re not expecting it.

    To really succeed in bringing about true, lasting freedom, we need to have the exact opposite of what the communists want. They want no one to own a means of production. The only way to make their schemes hopeless, and, simultaneously make people prosperous, proud and happy, is to initiate a paradigm in which EVERYONE owns a means of production, and likely many!

  16. What, exactly, are Pete Buttigieg’s qualifications to be Secretary of Transportation? None, as far as I can tell. Seems that he was appointed just so that the Democrats can get headlines about the “First Openly Gay Cabinet Member.”

    His, father, it seems, was an actual Trotskyite Marxist… not long ago that would have disqualified his son from being so much as dogcatcher. Perhaps the apples don’t fall far from the tree?

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/buttigieg-father-marxist/

    • Hi X,

      What qualifications do any of these cretins have to run our lives? Biden is a barely-graduated-from-law-school shyster politician with dementia. Buttigieg is a liberal arts academic. Lenin had “useful idiots.” These people are useless eaters.

      • At least A-O-C was a bartender, that is an honorable vocation 🙂

        It goes waaay back, witness the rejection of Barry Goldwater by the nascent Buzzard Party back in 1964. He was a successful businessman, a decorated WW2 pilot (flew over the Hump, the Himalayan supply route, really tough flying there), and dedicated anti-Buzzard-Party thinker. He’d flown 165 different aircraft types over his long flying time. Gen. Goldwater did not graduate from college! Just because he was not one of Them, the Kleptokrat Wing went after him with Nelson Rockefeller, and the Communist Wing with L-B-J. Barry Goldwater was a brilliant mind, an accomplished man, but it counted for nothing in the Politburo on the Potomac.

        • Amen, Crusty –

          I have always admired Goldwater as a man, even when I disagree with him on various political/philosophical matters. An impressive resume, indeed.

      • And you went to George Mason….

        You really don’t have the academic chops to evaluate others.

        Because your academic achievements are……meager.Clover

          • Walter Williams taught at George Mason U, that’s good enough for me.

            Most of the smartest folks I have ever known did not graduate from any organized institution of (supposedly) higher learning. Ticket punching does not equal intelligence.

          • Leave it to someone who actually assigns value to “academic achievements” to think that makes a quality insult 🤔

            HAL ain’t shit, I just compared an anonymous person’s avatar to the likes of Rocky Dennis, that was cold. Hey wait, wasn’t HAL the autist reeeeeeeing over masks and vaccines a couple months back? Man Eric, how much is he charging you for all that headspace you’re taking up 🙂 At least hot air’s included.

            • Hi Moose!

              Debating someone like HAL isn’t difficult as there is no debate. Even if I never graduated high school, it would have no bearing on the argument I make. HAL’s impugning of my alma mater as an argument is like him pointing out that my haircut is mediocre as an argument.

              The contrary is also true. A person who has a doctorate is not right – in debate – because he has a doctorate. He is right – or wrong – based on the facts he presents and how they add up in defense of the point he is making.

              Is formal education valuable? It can be, if one increases one’s store of relevant information or acquires higher-order skills, as in the case of STEM professions. But is formal education necessary to be competent – excellent – in any field? By no means. Some of the greatest thinkers, inventors and scientists were autodidacts. They educated themselves. They honed their minds – and going to college isn’t the only way to do that.

              I am not suggesting my degree is worthless, nor that I didn’t learn valuable things at GMU. I am stating that most of my education was acquired on my own – and that I am still in “college” today, as is true of any person who likes learning for its own sake.

              • Yeah there are kids coming up in homeschool now who could quickly dismantle arguments from HALish types.

                Giving college brands so much credibility is what got us into this mess in the first place, Harvard scumbags telling us we don’t have a right to bodily sovereignty, or private property, trying to declare for us what’s true or not based on whatever narrative they wanna spin that week, fuck that!

        • WTH is wrong with GMU?

          Maybe some of us didn’t see the need to spend a fortune on a four year degree while we majored in basket weaving at Princeton only to graduate and become a barista at Starbucks for $12/hr.

          I would love to know your credentials – Harvard? Yale? Oxford? Stanford? Elitist Yankee?

          • Thanks for the back-up, RG!

            Even if I never attended college, it would be immaterial as regards my arguments. People like this HAL person are apparently not smart enough to understand this. Which makes me wonder about his academic achievements!

            • I, too am a former alumni of GMU, but even if I was not I never understood the lefts constant disdain for persons that did not attend the “top tier of schools” and their constant rehashing toward the “uneducated”.

              One goes to school/college for academics. One becomes educated once they leave that institution. I have discovered those with little to no college usually have the strongest principles and an abundance of common sense, where the MBAs of the world are usually the first to jump on the quasi central bandwagon even when the science does not point that way.

              • The purpose of college generally (there are always exceptions and outliers) is to create people who participate in, implicitly and explicitly support, and defend without question the “System.” The purpose of Ivy League and regionally equivalent colleges is to to create people who meet the general characteristics described above for the System as well as the ruling “Establishment.” It’s why a person like the gesundheitfuhrer in NC is not licensed as a physician in NC but is a graduate of Yale Medical School.

              • I just wanted to pipe in here to point out that Indoctrination and Education are synonyms. It really doesnt matter where it comes from but I’ve noticed that the scale is weighted.

            • Oh sure, go to an Ivy League school, or one of the many indoctrination centers passing themselves off as places of higher learning. After four years, you will have lost all common sense, wear a face diaper while driving alone in your car, and believe the earth is going to turn into a cinder due to the rising levels of a trace gas. You will also be made to believe that the USA is a racist country, all white people are racist (Except members of the Democrat Party of course), and they enjoy white privilege (Again, except for members of the Democrat Party).

                • Eric,

                  The world lost a great man when Professor Williams passed away. The man had more common sense than the entire faculty of any university today. I never met the man, but read a lot of his writings and his biography. He “made it” at a time when there was actual racism, and a lot of obstacles in his way. He is truly missed.

          • We lived in MA at the time, my son applied to GMU only because his guidance counselor told him he needed to have more options than his dream schools, so he pretty much threw a dart at the the wall and came up with Mason. Well, they wound up offering him a full ride scholarship, and I made him go there. Best decision ever. He still lives in NOVA, met his wife there, and was making 300k a year 5 years after graduating. That’s until a flu vaccine laid him up with GBS, now he’s in a wheelchair for life. That’s why I’ll never even think about taking another vaccine. Nonetheless, GMU is a fantastic school. One of the best.

        • Gee, I didn’t know there were “academic chops”. My observations of the decline in value of any college education indicate the primary purpose of colleges is to provide a venue for drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity, while encouraging “students” to base their notions on their feelings instead of any empirical evidence. Even those fields one would think required empirical evidence. “Science” for example. Current scientific study has totally rejected any such evidence that does not make them feel good, and/or make them wealthy. Saint Fauci for instance. He keeps changing his “facts”, which cannot be done to real facts. It can easily be done to propaganda that results in his increased wealth.

      • Eric,

        Passing a new (reconstituted) tax is simply a nod to the tree huggers and actually unnecessary.

        With cancellation of pipeline construction and placing a moratorium on federal land fracking, increased cost of the raw product will drive fuel prices back to “normal”.

        As a result, federal and state taxes will increase.

        The current crop of old, white guy politicians are never that smart.

        But wait!

        We have a savior “in the wings”, one aneurysm away from the presidency.

    • What qualification is there for the need of a Dept of Transportation, or any other Dept. at all, other than another means of extracting wealth at gunpoint. There is one and only one qualification for any politician. One must embrace life as a parasite with gusto.

  17. This gas tax will hurt independent truckers in the last margin of their existence; which has been affordable fuel. Do you think Bezos is going to allow a rate hike on independent trucking? He’ll freeze them out and hire the illegals crossing the boarder via a broker.
    I hope independent truckers have a civil disobedient moment and have a national strike. I could live off my stored food for a while, as they make their point that the Selected one can blow methane out his carbon hole.

    • This would have the added benefit of showing those latte drinking soy boys in the woke city areas of the bluest of blue regions just how dependent they are on those fosil fuels. And their continued ability to live in those bastions of liberalism without those fuels. How quickly would the supply of soy milk and tofu run out in a place like nyc without truckers hauling it in on a daily basis? I would back this 100%

    • Wasn’t that supposed to have happened already, back in the summer of ’20? For OM or sumpin’ Strikes, particularly general strikes, are an interesting tactic, one I’ve suggested to folks on a number of occasions. People don’t seem to like it. God forbid they miss a paycheck or lose a dollar of revenue if they are the owner…

    • Oh, wait a minute…NAFTA allowed Mexican trucks to be driven into the USA with no adherence to the myriad US FMVSS/EPA/etc. standards. Watch Bootie Judge and his cronies in the Communist Wing of the Buzzard Party, they’ll re-implement NAFTA with the help of the Kleptocrat Wing of the Buzzard Party. They’ll sneak those trucking exemptions back in. Bezos and his cronies will be covered, they can just contract with foreign drivers, with foreign trucks, and there’s the profit margin!

      Now, it makes one wonder, how are the federal gas taxes collected and delivered to the Buzzard Party nest in DC? If it is done by the several States, then the States could refuse to deliver the mother’s milk of tax money to the nest…what is DC going to do about it, send B-52’s over Austin?

    • Unfortunately independent truckers are a dying breed and have been for decades. A strike by independents at this juncture would be barley noticed and ignored by the MSM.

    • Most independent truckers are barely squeaking by, and even then they do it by living in their trucks year round. The last company I worked for consisted primarily of independent truckers who had just sold their trucks and started working for someone else. The big trucking companies collect them, and even though they don’t make as much money, they don’t have any of the onerous government headaches either. They don’t have as much to lose. When some government thug slaps a $3k ticket on a truck, the owner pays instead. In the end they’re taking home more than if they were working for themselves.

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