Gas tax fever

BECAUSE GOVERNOR Patrick's reasons for raising the gasoline tax to an unwarranted 19 cents per gallon remain unconvincing, I agree with the Globe that his notion to track our personal cars so that he can redundantly tax us for each mile we drive is an exercise in poor logic ("A bad excuse for a tax," Editorial, March 17).

This additional toll would provide nothing to taxpayers except to intensify the total burden already suffered, which would further degrade our ability to overcome our current hardships.

Furthermore, the method to levy this double-dipping tax is a bizarre, textbook example of how government can complicate whatever it touches. His wildly complex solution involves computer chips, inspection stickers, and an as yet undisclosed infrastructure of government overseers to track them. Instead, why not simply record the odometer reading every year, something that already happens when our cars are inspected, and skip the microchips and Orwellian tracking network? That is, if the tax were reasonable and necessary, which it isn't.

We need creative, enduring solutions instead of the reflexive and thuggish application of tax revenues as a solution to every problem.

Lyle Lanham
Milford

NEED REVENUE to maintain roads and bridges? Want to make driving safer at the same time?

Tax cellphone calls from moving vehicles at 25 cents a minute!

We might need a little help from the techies to implement this, but if the cellphone companies know the duration and location of the call, they can compute the average speed, and tax calls from phones going faster than 5 miles per hour.

Douglas McCraith
Newton