Oregon instituting mandatory GPS tracking

Good day all. This story came out on Friday, right before Independence Day. Oregon is instituting a program to charge a tax for the miles you travel when driving. The way they plan on doing this is installing a GPS tracker into every car in the state.

The reason they want to do this comes down to cold hard cash. Thanks to modern technology, the gas taxes aren’t covering highway expenses. The issue with the GPS unit is that the state will now know where you are and have gone, right down to the inch. Here are some of the details from Fox News:

David Hastings is a rare American. This long-time hybrid car owner from Oregon wants to pay higher taxes for roads and bridges and says the current 30 cents per gallon state gas tax barely affects him. “I’ve been free-loading on the highways for 20 years driving electric cars or hybrid cars, getting at least 40 miles to the gallon. So I haven’t been paying my share,” Hastings said. Now, Hastings will pay more thanks to OReGO — the first pay-by-the-mile program in the U.S.

David Hastings is what we generally call, sheep. He has no problem whatsoever with being totally in the control of the central government. George Orwell would be so proud of him.

Oregon’s Department of Transportation has been working on it for 15 years as a way to eventually replace the gas tax, which has been flat due to an influx of high mileage vehicles and people driving less.

And as I understand it, has been slammed by most people for 15 years over this dumb idea too.

Right now the program is voluntary and being capped at 5,000 participants, but an ODOT official told Fox News the ultimate goal is to make it mandatory and change the way states pay for roads — forever.

You want to pay for the roads? There are several solutions. First, stop raiding the funds raised by the gas tax for things like bike paths. Second, try something that has been used for centuries. It’s called a toll.

According to a national usage fee alliance, 28 states are in various stages of following down the same road. However, there are also privacy concerns. Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car’s every move.

This will not end well.

“To put a GPS monitor in everybody’s car, the government already knows too much about us as it is,” Jeff Kruse, a Republican lawmaker told Fox News.

I see the fine hands of the Progressive Liberal Fascist Democrats with this idea. They’ve always wanted a totalitarian police state. Then there is the actual charge they are thinking about.

Others are raising questions about the cost. Getting the gas tax is cheap, but OReGO vendors will eat up 40 cents of every dollar collected, and for those not used to paying any gas tax, it could be a whole new sticker shock – every month.

I understand from the article that it will be one and a half cents per mile. I just did the math for my daily commute to my Real World Job. It works out to about $5 a week. The gas tax for my state works out a little less. I have no doubt that this won’t be a replacement to the gas tax, but an addition to it.

Jeff Allen, of “Drive Oregon,” supports the one and a half cent per mile usage fee — to a point. “We need to be subsidizing and incentivizing electric cars and not putting more taxes or fees on them, not discouraging people from buying them in any way,” Allen said.

Electric cars are a dead end technology. The batteries are to heavy, cost to much, the cars range is to short and it takes hours to recharge. Of course, for a moonbat electric cars are so green and are powered by rainbow colored unicorn farts. I’m not going into automotive technology though. What I am going to go into is just how bad an idea this is.

We already have the alphabet soup of federal agencies putting GPS units on people’s cars without a warrant. Having a state do this, ostensibly for “Tax purposes” just screams abuse. You know that police will demand access to the tracking data and won’t bother with a warrant. Then there will be compliance problems. Outside of the Oregonian Moonbat cities, people will not only refuse to have these things in their cars, they will remove them, smash them into small pieces and send them back to the state and drive anyway.

This will lead to charging people who do this with felonies. We’re already are close enough to an outright shooting civil war in this country. Forcing people to put spying devices in their cars and motorcycles will push it over the edge.

If moonbats want these thing, then put them into electric and hybrid cars. Cars that stick to good, old fashioned, tried and true technology, (The Internal Combustion Engine), then they must be exempt from this since they will be paying the standard gas tax. Try and mandate it, and the odds of “Game On” increase significantly. If you must raise money, stick some toll booths on the roads.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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