Michigan Rep. Shirkey (great name means avoid work or other responsibilities) introduced a bill to help raise taxes in Michigan where the roads are so bad they look like we’ve been bombed. Looking at Bill 4608 you can see it’s full of corrections changing the word TAX to “Registration Fee”. The lobbyist who wrote the bill obviously wasn’t as scared of the tax word as Shirkey’s intern who fixed it. Our gov wants $1 billion+ to fix the roads and Shirkey thinks boosting fees on alt fuel vehicles is worth wasting time on. How many of these cars are on the road in Michigan? Probably not enough funds would be raised to pave 10 foot of road after the paperwork it takes to put this new law in action. Shirkey thinks people who have spent more money to buy fuel efficient cars (and paid the taxes for a new vehicle) are unfairly using the road. In the interest of being fair I’m more than willing to pay additional registration fee (tax) for the decreased fuel taxes I’m paying. And since we’re being fair I’d like to be compensated for the benefits an electric motor provides, such as reduced pollution and reduced reliance on fossil fuel from foreign hostile countries. Full disclosure I am a nonsmoker and only drink occasionally; I also use public transportation on occasion. Using Shirkey’s logic it would be fair to tax me more because I do not pay enough taxes at the tobacco stand, liquor stores and gas pumps. In the real world someone who works for a living, not a Shirkey, would realize $1 billion is going to take work and shared sacrifice to get there. How about setting a floor under the gas tax so no matter what the price per gallon our state gets a set amount of money? How about actually using ALL the gas tax money collected be used on our roads for the next 5 years instead of going to the general fund? How about repealing the automatic pay raises for Michigan legislators until our state doesn’t look like a third world country? In fact, we as taxpayer should be able to evaluate the effectiveness of how you are running our state to your pay. That would be FAIR
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