doubleplusundead

April 29, 2009

Let's put a government-controlled GPS in each and every car!

I suppose the silver lining is, the Feds will be able to find your car each and every time it's stolen.

The tax would entail equipping vehicles with GPS technology to determine how many miles a car has been driven and whether on interstate highways or secondary roads. The devices would also calculate the amount of tax owed.

Who's going to start organizing the efforts to get 48% of Americans to break their mandatory car-nannies? I think it's time to keep an eye on who's running against James Oberstar and start doing everything we can to make sure Oberstar loses his seat in 2010. It's a shame, because he's generally against gun control and abortion, but this sort of nanny-stating can't be allowed to get a foothold.

Posted by: Alice H at 07:09 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 136 words, total size 1 kb.

If there were only something else we could tax ... something that every car consumed and that was highly correlated with how much you drove your car (and thus consumed the public goods of roads, etc.) ... something simple that didn't require complicated and intrusive technology ...

hmmmm ... let me think this one over ....

Posted by: Hermit Dave at April 29, 2009 07:53 PM (WhFvm)

2 Where does Minn. find these douchebags? Oh wait, the same place we do in California.

Posted by: MrsPaulsFishSticks at April 29, 2009 08:27 PM (PBGAP)

3 Sacramento?

Posted by: Sean M. at April 29, 2009 08:33 PM (rLWHv)

4 I'm still trying to decide if this is a thinly disguised ploy to tax us twice on driving (the first tax obviously being the mysterious consumable Hermit Dave was referring to) or a thinly disguised ploy to track all our movements.

Posted by: Alice H at April 29, 2009 09:40 PM (qJHYy)

Exactly Alice ... it has to be one or the other. And it's worse (yet funnier) than that. I have some further commentary on this here.

Note: this is not blog pimpage ... it's an attempt to keep comments to a reasonable length. Do not, under any circumstances, click on the above link.

Posted by: Hermit Dave at April 30, 2009 01:20 AM (WhFvm)

6 it has to be one or the other

why can't it be both? Who says our bureaucracy can't be ambitious and kill two birds with one stone?

Posted by: Alice H at April 30, 2009 07:51 AM (qJHYy)

7 I already have a plan for mine, I'm going to take it to Italy and put it on the Venice-Rome train and let them try to figure out why I'm driving back and forth across Italy a few times a day.

Posted by: Veeshir at April 30, 2009 08:22 AM (ThMnZ)

At one point of sobriety in my academic careeer, we were required to write a technical paper on how to spoof GPS. Need to dig that puppy out.

Posted by: tangonine at April 30, 2009 08:58 AM (zS8Lk)

9 Yes, please dig it out. We can have the conservative equivalent of the DeCSS fiasco.

Posted by: Alice H at April 30, 2009 09:14 AM (qJHYy)

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