Tax Code needs a thorough jolt

Am I the only one who sees the irony in the annual tax on electric cars that several states are considering? I will also vent a little about tax policy generally.

It seems that since electric cars don’t consume gas (presumably a good thing), states and federal governments may lose revenue from lower gasoline tax receipts.

Therefore, a $100-a-year tax is being contemplated to make up for the “lost” dollars.

Ironically, the federal government, in its wisdom, provides a generous $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit to encourage purchase of these non-gasoline consuming cars.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that electric vehicle tax breaks will cost over $2 billion during the next decade with little or no impact on emissions, and that the federal government will spend $7.5 billion it doesn’t have on various incentives for the industry.

Only our government can find logic in simultaneously providing a useless tax incentive and levying an offsetting tax increase on the same item.

All of this nonsense supports what many of us knew all along: First, Newton’s Third Law that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” holds for tax policy as well as physics (see recent fiscal cliff debacle), and second, the lunacy of the U. S. Tax Code is the result of inept intervention in the free market designed by non-business savvy, politically motivated bureaucrats who refuse to acknowledge that their efforts to micromanage the economy have failed miserably.

The Rube Goldberg device known as the U.S. Tax Code needs to be scrapped in its entirety.

It places the United States at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace and enables Washington to play a high-stakes shell game with taxpayers.

Kevin Verner

Rhoden Island Drive

Daniel Island