Taking us for a ride
Watch the prez pick up right where Gov. Bacon drops us off
As dreadful as Dementia Joe Biden’s multi-trillion “American (Con) Jobs Plan” is, there was one terrible idea even the Democrats dared not embrace:
Jacking up gasoline taxes to beggar the middle classes.
Oh sure, the Democrats did float a mileage-tax trial balloon last week, but it was quickly walked back. No one, it appears, really believes it’s a good idea to further crush working Americans and create even more inflation than the rest of these fatuous woke Biden boondoggles will.
No one except Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts.
It’s not enough, apparently, that Gov. Bacon (as Sen. Ed Markey calls him) presides over the fourth-highest COVID-19 death rate among the 50 states, or the fifthhighest rate of job loss in the U.S.
With those kinds of numbers, you’d think Gov. Charlie Parker (as Dementia Joe calls him) would be resting on his laurels. Hasn’t he done … enough?
But now the governor is moving on to “crush the will” of the middle classes, as Baker’s undersecretary of climate change put it before he was fired for his unfortunate candor.
The scheme, as the $130,000-a-year California drifter explained it, is to “turn the screws” on those who work for a living by, among other things, raising the state tax on gasoline from 24 cents a gallon to perhaps as much as 62 cents, according to a Tufts Universtudy.
You keep hoping that even the Massachusetts kleptocracy will finally wake up to the fact that this kind of insatiable greed is unsustainable.
But no, Tall Deval can’t let go of his own dream to beggar the people who once voted for him.
Last week, he signed new “climate legislation” that, according to the press release, “Will Combat Climate Change While Growing Massachusetts’ Economy.”
The planet will be saved, in other words, by the very same state government that already does such a marvelous job with the State Police, the MBTA, the RMV, the Department of Public Health (“Over 65,000 Criminal Drug Lab Tests Falsisity fied!”), the DCF, UMass, Massport, etc. etc.
And now comes … the TCI. It’s a giant increase in the gasoline tax that will be levied without a vote by either the legislature or the electorate. To repeat, the aim is to “turn the screws” on the state’s drivers by making gasoline unaffordable.
TCI, as Gov. Bacon put it in that same press release, is “launching a groundbreaking multi-jurisdictional program that will reduce motor vehicle pollution by at least 26 percent and generate over $1.8 billion.”
That $1.8 billion in new taxes is the key, of course.
Do you know how many more hacks you can hire to “telecommute” with that much dough? Oh sure, it’ll destroy thousands of bluecollar jobs, but what the hell does Tall Deval care about those deplorables. He’s already spent the last year putting the screws to them with his hysterical lockdowns, while the hackerama has reveled in its nowork paid vacation.
Only three states signed on to this TCI mega-scam, and the other two, Connecticut and Rhode Island, are at least going to put it to a legislative vote: Do you want to impoverish everyone driving a car or truck — yay or nay?
Not Massachusetts, though. We don’t need no stinkin’ popular approval to wreck the economy.
No one’s fooled by this latest flim-flam. This is about hiring more $150,000a-year climate consultants, diversity coordinators, undersecretaries of inclusion, legislative liaisons and intergovernmental outreach deputies.
Of course some of the money from the new taxes will go to, you guessed it, “environmental justice communities,” whatever those might be.
TCI is definitely going to save the planet, though. The U.S. represents 5% of the world’s population, and Maskachusetts is about 2% of that 5%. If Charlie Parker can only crush that 2% of 5% with his 150% gas-tax increase … polar bears will live!
As one of the dissidents in Rhode Island accurately described this grift last week: “Make no mistake, this isn’t about reducing carbon emissions. It’s basically a cash grab by these states.”
This open-and-gross heist by Gov. Bacon is not to ignore the horrors of what Dementia Joe’s handlers are likewise scheming to do to “just us,” as opposed to their “justice” voters.
Dementia Joe has a dream as to what his own Con Job can accomplish. As he put it so eloquently in Pittsburgh on Wednesday (all dialogue guaranteed verbatim):
“Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach if we modernize those highways. You and your family can travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas on board a high-speed train.”
Can we quote you on that, Mr. President?
There used to be a popular bumper sticker in Cambridge: Think Globally, Act Locally.
Same thing with these unspeakable tax hikes. Fight Globally, Fight Locally.