House Republican pushing mileage tax to bolster Transportation funds; Update: Or did he?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen Democrats raise the idea of adding a new revenue source to supplement the gas tax, as revenues have declined from this stream due to increased fuel efficiency thanks to mandates to that effect imposed by Congress. One bad idea that never seems to die is a mileage tax, which would force Americans to track their travel — or have government do it for them. That idea got shelved along with the Democratic House majority in 2011, but now it’s crept across the aisle (via Instapundit):
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster said he favors user fees including a vehicle miles tax to pay for a long-term U.S. highway bill that would extend for at least five years.
Shuster rejected the idea of raising the nation’s 18.4 cents-per-gallon gasoline tax, now the primary method of paying for road, bridge and mass transit projects. Besides a mileage tax, he said other funding methods include higher taxes on energy exploration and bringing back corporate profits earned overseas.
Well, that’s just a cornucopia of bad ideas, isn’t it? Higher energy taxes in a stagnant economy disincentivizes investment and risk by adding cost, and it applies direct inflationary pressure to retail goods, especially produce. Taxing funds that corporations keep offshore is part of why those funds are offshore in the first place — a badly contructed corporate-tax system that puts American corporations at a competitive disadvantage. One thing that Transportation could do is strip out all of the pork-barrel projects that get written into the bill, which is usually among the porkiest of all appropriations from Congress. Maybe that extra cash can keep them busy for a while.  Even better yet, they could stop spending billions of dollars for high-speed rail in systems that don’t come close to crossing state lines, and let the states build their own toy choo-choo systems and deal with the massive bankruptcies that follow.
But of all the dumb ideas in that effort, the mileage tax is the worst. A gas tax is a usage tax, one that doesn’t require Americans to keep special records or for government to snoop into their driving habits. As I wrote almost three years ago, this is an entrée to massive invasions of privacy and IRS harassment:
One shudders to think what happens when the IRS gets your annual mileage wrong and a taxpayer disputes the record.  Where were you on the night of April 19th, Canarsie?  We show you drove 6.3 miles to Bada-Bing Strip Club in New Jersey. Even if exact destinations aren’t recorded (earlier suggestions were to use GPS devices), the taxpayer would get hit with a massive bill during the annual tax-preparation ritual with little or no chance to dispute the claims of the government.
Plus, let’s talk about equipment costs, both private and public.  This new tax system would require tracking equipment in every vehicle, which would mean retrofit costs for current vehicles and higher prices for new cars immediately.

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