by Shaun Kenney
Just to illustrate how fanatically out of touch Senate Democrats are as they frantically try to spend $3 billion on more government, check out State Senator Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) on Twitter as he blasts Governor Glenn Youngkin’s proposal for gasoline tax relief:
Remember — we are sitting on a $3bn surplus fueled by COVID relief dollars and not by any metric of economic success. Yet Senate Democrats continue to lean into the hammock of so-called budget cuts as they continue to shove money into the maw of state government for the sake of producing mediocre results.
Just to illustrate how inane Surovell’s argument is, every year in Richmond there is the observation that as fuel efficiencies continue to increase and electric cars continue to gain in popularity, the effective impact of the gasoline tax to fund Virginia’s transportation system — which is not linked in any form to local land use one might add — becomes less and less every year. Couple this with the shift to green energy and the efforts of shady third-party environmentalist groups, and the beneficiaries always seem to be Russian oil companies who benefit from $100+/barrel oil prices.
Thus the cost of heating oil, gasoline, kerosene, fertilizers and other byproducts continues to climb, and those who are hurt the most are your fixed income seniors and working class poor.
Not that Surovell gives a damn about those people.
Yet the wider argument not specifically raised by Youngkin but one that ought to be discussed in a more active sense next year is whether or not the gasoline tax — like so many other tax vehicles we use in Virginia — is obsolete.
With the Biden administration announcing new rules that will force auto makers to increase their fuel efficiencies to 40mpg by 2026, two punches are being telegraphed here: that the gasoline tax isn’t going to be a reliable revenue source as fuel economies continue to increase, and that the conflict in Eastern Europe is going to continue for the foreseeable future, necessitating policies that will further guarantee US energy security over the next four years.
But that doesn’t bother Northern Virginia types making six figures all that much. After all, they can afford the higher taxes. Why can’t poor people? Which is why Surovell channelling his inner Paris Hilton and telling his constituents to “stop being poor” is both tone deaf and heartlessly numb.
This column has been republished with permission from The Republican Standard.
