Tracking our driving and other bad ideas

Another plan, brought forth by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is floating around our nation's capital with the aim of separating the U.S. citizen from his money. The plan envisions a program that will charge each of us a fee based on the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) that we drive.

Forget all the esoteric reasons that it gives, just remember that the Clinton Administration placed a nickel (five cents) a gallon tax on gasoline that was to be used for reducing the federal debt. Well, the tax is still there and so is the debt which has been rising like a column of smoke from a forest fire. Here is Big Brother that will have to place an instrument in our autos to track our VMT.

I wonder, if like the Obamacare bill, it will mandate that the government have access to our bank accounts in order for them to extract the money from us. All the while we are slipping down this slippery slope of big government on our way to the ultimate nanny state. Wouldn't it be easier for the government to just take all our money and give us an allowance to live on? They could ration the number of miles that we could drive in the same way that health care is going to be rationed under the current "unconstitutional Obamacare" edict.

Let's see, they could tell where we drive, as the daily trips would be recorded so with simple math they could, by simply drawing a circle, determine our proximate destinations. Of course, that would lead to further restrictions if that allowed the feds to determine we might be going to church too many times and therefore violating some socialistic principle because they know there is no God.

The next thing might be the rationing of tires because they are petroleum products and we have to reduce our dependency on oil. Then the home monitoring of our heating and cooling habits because, there again, we are not conserving energy efficiently.

Just as the anti-Second Amendment folks are planning to make it impossible to buy ammunition, so shall the government geeks think of any number of ways to intrude on our privacy and further erode our freedoms that were once among the envy of the civilized world.

We are allegedly helping Middle East people in their fight to throw off the yoke of authoritarian dictators and yet our government is turning into one. A president who disregards rulings from federal courts (oil drilling in the Gulf to health care) shows his contempt for our system of law and order. The man who wants to establish a civilian defense corps, loyal to him and armed as good as the military, to carry out his mandates and not the constitutional ones that we should be living under.

Each time one of these insipid things is put into law, they diminish us as a country and an ideal to be looked up to. Ronald Reagan said we were that "shining city on a hill." Obama sees us as that darkened city under the hill of oppression.