ORWELLIAN STATE: California Wants to Tax you PER MILE you Drive, by Tracking your Cell Phones

Just a few months after implementing a massive 60% hike in gasoline taxes, raising them from $0.297 per gallon to $0.417, the state of California is now one step closer to implementing a brand new tax that would charge drivers for each mile driven.



As a quick example of how shockingly misguided such a piece of legislation would be, the logical conclusion here is that poor people who have been forced out of cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego due to rising rents would now be forced to incur yet another massive tax for simply commuting into city centers to do their jobs...in essence, in many cases, it would serve as a regressive tax on the poorest families...



California - Senate - Bill - Mileage - Tax


So how did we get here? It all started back in 2014 when California passed Senate Bill 1077 calling for a mileage tax. The bill kicked off the California Road Charge Pilot Program which sought to design and test various strategies for implementing a mileage tax.



Now, after 3 full years of studying various methodologies for tracking mileage, from requiring a "plug-in" for each vehicle to tracking your smart phone movements to more manual systems that would track odometers, the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA), according to a newly filed report is officially ready to declare a mileage tax 'feasible'.