Dems already showing their colors – new & higher taxes
Well, that didn’t take long:
“If the gas tax is the way we do that, so be it. It hasn’t been raised in a long time,” Connolly said. “I hate to talk about raising taxes first thing out, but we have to stabilize the revenue source for the Federal Highway Trust Fund.”
Congressman-elect Gerry Connolly, ladies & gentlemen, from Alexandria, VA. He “hates to talk about raising taxes” but he can’t even wait a week after the election to broach the subject. I’d argue that the “Trust Fund” would be more trustworthy if Congress left the money contained within alone and, perhaps, stop with the increasing earmarks for other projects. If I wanted to waste my breath, that is. Even better are the comments from newly-elected DC Councilman Michael Brown:
Connolly isn’t the only local politician with an eye on raising taxes. D.C. Councilmember-elect Michael Brown tells WTOP one way for the District to balance its budget is to get commuters to pay for city services.
“Sixty-eight percent of the cars that come in our city are not from the District. They use our services, they chew up our roads — we have to figure something out.”
Yes, and those 68% of the cars carry people who spend money at businesses located in the District, generating tax revenues for DC. They pay parking fees (a lot of parking fees), they eat at the restaurants, buy the goods and services offered. Without them, the revenues would drop by more than half. So, just to see if I have this straight, his plan is to give them every incentive to not drive into DC? To give businesses a quantifiable argument to consider locating outside of the District?
Good luck with that.
Welcome to the digital age, Councilman. We are connected via our technology in a way literally undreamt of just a couple of decades ago. Just this week, I conducted engineering briefings from the front room of my home to customers located in DC that included their contract engineers located in California, Texas, and England. They not only heard my voice, they saw my presentation slides, worked with me on a virtual whiteboard, and saw my face as I responded to their questions. (OK, that last one might not rise to the level of a feature, but…) The thing is the systems I used aren’t some experimental lab job, they’re off-the-shelf products available right now. Those systems were made accessible by gear small enough to fit in my laptop backpack with room left over for my portfolio notebook and an umbrella and – here’s the fun part – I could just as easily have conducted that briefing from any hotel room that had a broadband hookup or from a table at the local Starbucks.
A full day’s work, folks, and I never once had to cross the Beltway.
Now, I can do all of that or I can fight the DC traffic, pay the gas, pay for parking, fight with the over-enhanced and (often) conflicting security requirements to get into customer buildings and, if Councilman Brown has his way, pay a tax on top of that for the priviledge. Hmmm. Let me think….
