The Obama administration has been tentatively floating the idea of a mileage tax.

Now, I think they’re actually not going to implement it any time soon, since the idea has gotten quite a negative reception – but I still have one question about some of the thought processes behind the tax: Why the heck is the first idea for charging per mileage to install tracking devices in every car, rather than simply reading the odometer every so often? Given the choice between an extremely expensive and immensely Orwellian implementation vs a cheap and fairly non-intrusive implementation, it’s fairly telling that the bureaucrats who floated this idea explicitly prefer to go completely Big Brother.

I would also like to point out that actually, a mileage tax isn’t such a bad idea – if I thought for one minute that the funds would stay isolated to our road system. The idea of raising an amount of money proportionate to the usage of roads is pretty much something that needs to be done to keep the road system maintained. Private companies can do an excellent job in this regard, but then people have to be willing to put up with tolls.