Playing The Tax Game

Big government types love to tell us how reasonable their efforts to extract more money from the people who earn it are.

"It's just the cost of one Starbucks latte per month."

"It's just the cost of one soda per day."

Here's my new favorite, justifying the Democrat Senate's DOA proposal to increase the gas tax by one cent a year for the next five years, raising $2 million per year (an estimate which seems low), from Senate Democrat leader, Little Dicky Saslaw:

"the increase would cost the average family the equivalent of 'two Big Mac meals a year.'”

But what if Republicans tried to transfer funds from, say, education spending? How about taking it from spending on school lunches? "The transfer would cost the average pudgy sixth-grader in Virginia's government schools the cost of a Big Mac lunch once a month."

Or from teachers' salaries? Given that there are 86,569 government-school teachers in Virginia it would only cost each teacher less than $24, and "The transfer would cost the average government schoolteachers' family the equivalent of one Big Mac meal a year."

As I've said before, there are a lot of good conceptual reasons why the gas tax --- a flat amount per gallon sold --- is unsound. Strong arguments can be made that it should be restructured as a percentage of the cost of a gallon of gas.

Leave it to Democrats to avoid the strong intellectual arguments, and instead rely upon Little Dicky's demagogic tactics.