I'll Be Watching You...

The Obama administration claims not to support a VMT:

In a written statement, the department said, "The policy of taxing motorists based on how many miles they have traveled is not and will not be Obama administration policy."

The idea -- which involves tracking drivers through Global Positioning System (GPS) units in their cars -- is gaining support in some states as a way of making up for a shortfall in highway funding. Oregon carried out a pilot program and deemed it "successful."

The powers-that-be claim that the information would never, ever be used to track the movements of citizens:

"Privacy is protected," the report argued, saying the pilot program included "engineering requirements to maintain as much privacy as practicable while still allowing a feasible way to audit and challenge billings."

"No specific vehicle point location or trip data could be stored or transmitted" in the pilot program, and "the only centrally stored data needed to assess mileage fees were vehicle identification, zone mileage totals for each vehicle and the amount of fuel purchased."

Yeah, right. I'm sure that there are enormous technical hurdles to collecting more specific information. We've gone from security cameras on private property, to photoenforcement of traffic intersections to biometrics in the school cafeteria? Where does it all end? In the internment camp, of course. I note that the cameras at intersections actually increased the number of accidents, and school cafeterias and the highway system seem to have performed perfectly well before any of this was implemented. Don't let the men in black fool you: this is not, and never was, about raising funds or public safety or the like. It's about power. Don't let anybody sell you any garbage about "we need a national ID card to enforce the border," or any of this other nonsense. Rome functioned without a national ID card. Seems to me they got along reasonably well, actually, for quite some time. The border is not enforced, and the budget is not balanced, and the banking system is in tatters etc., etc., etc., because there is not sufficient political will to change these things, and for no other reason. There will never be any "benefit," whatever is promised, only cost. Thankfully, even if such things do happen, our government will be bankrupt within a few years, so at least we might stand a fighting chance of avoiding 1984. Every cloud has a silver lining.