May 5, 2022 at 12:26 p.m.
Tony Evers: The gas tax man and his gas tax scam
Tony Evers: The gas tax man and his gas tax scam
One would think they would be looking for ways to lower the costs of everyday living in a new era of rampant inflation. One would think they would be looking for ways to cut government spending so they could tax us less, and that they would be using a massive government surplus to lower taxes even more.
But our governor, Tony Evers, isn't doing any of that. He's doing just the opposite, in fact. He's growing government furiously, and doing so in a way that, if he is successful, will not only waste the state's historic surplus but drive the cost of living ever higher for Wisconsinites, especially in energy.
To see what's going on, let's shuffle on over to the environmental sector of his administration. To get there, go past the Hall of Equitable Government Dependence and the Bureau of Ever Higher but Socially Just Taxation, then hang a left by the bottomless spending pool, and then it's just past the Ministry of Government Re-Education Camps and the Department of Health Dictates.
There you will see, gleaming in the sun amid fresh air, clean water, and compost piles, Tony Evers's newly announced Office of Environmental Justice.
The is the same Office of Environmental Justice that Evers tucked into his last budget proposal, only to have Republicans rip it out. But there's always that old workhorse of the administrative state to get one's way - the executive order - and that's exactly what Evers ordered on Earth Day.
We are not entirely sure what the Office of Environmental Justice is supposed to do, but you can bet it will be loaded with bureaucrats working hard to do what bureaucrats are born to do - create ever more regulations and costs for people and to control their lives.
One has to wonder just how this mission will be different from that of the DNR, whose own mission statement includes its work "to protect and enhance our natural resources" and "to provide a healthy, sustainable environment." I assume that means a healthy, sustainable environment for all - you know, environmental justice - but maybe the governor knows something we don't about what goes on inside the DNR.
Or maybe his new office will really be a cocoon of woke environmental overlords whose job it will be to make sure the DNR is woke enough.
If that weren't enough, the governor proceeded to announce his Clean Energy Plan, which will gobble up a fair amount of the surplus, all while raising the price of energy even more. Gas has already surged past $4 a gallon, and that could be a bargain if the governor gets his way.
Gas prices are a great way to dissect the true nature of this administration. Never forget that Evers wants to punish anyone who lives outside Madison and Milwaukee and a few other Democratic pockets, and high gas prices are just the way to do it, especially in rural and northern Wisconsin.
Way back when, before Biden's Price Hikes, Evers had actually wanted to increase the gas tax by 8-cents per gallon and index future increases to inflation. If any reader is still thinking about voting for Evers in November, read that again: He wanted to index the gas tax to inflation.
Can you imagine what we would be paying if he had gotten his way? Thankfully, Republicans stopped him.
Lately, Evers has been running around urging the federal government to suspend the federal gas tax. OK, but then he should do the same thing with the state gas tax, but he says he won't.
Why? Well, apparently, according to Evers, high gas prices are solely a federal issue, what with the single cause being the war in Ukraine. If that's true, then gas prices could peer into the future because they were on the rise well before the Russian invasion.
It isn't true, of course. Not that there isn't a huge federal component in rising energy costs - more green energy initiatives and Biden's shut down of domestic energy production - but there's a huge state component to Wisconsin's inordinately high gas prices, too, and that's the inordinately high gas tax itself.
According to The Center Square, Wisconsin levies 32.9 cents per gallon on top of the federal tax, the 22nd highest gas tax among states. The gas taxes account for about 13 percent of the average price of a gallon of gas.
In a year in which average families are hurting, and even more so in rural areas where drivers must drive longer distances, the governor should work to have the tax to suspended. He's rightly pointed out that such a move would require the support of the Republican-led legislature, but they should be calling for it, too. It's the perfect time for bipartisanship.
Instead, the governor is creating new bureaucracies to figure out how to redistribute the pain of Democratic policies from traditional constituency groups in the cities to more conservative voters around the state. He doesn't need a bureaucracy to do that. With his tax and spend policies, he's doing it already.
The fact that the governor is prepared to spend the state's bountiful surplus rather than return it to taxpayers to help ease inflationary pain is outrageous. Government surpluses are generally due to over-taxation - if the government taxes for only what it needs to spend or save for a rainy day, there should never be a surplus. When there is, taxpayers should get it back.
In this case there is a second reason there's a huge surplus - the federal government just went wild printing pandemic money and injecting it into the economy, including to state and local governments. But that exploded inflation and has lasted longer then any temporary stimulus benefit received by most Americans. That's another reason the surplus should go back to taxpayers through tax cuts, including the gas tax.
That the governor apparently intends not only to withhold the surplus from taxpayers but to spend much of it on a green energy plan that will push energy prices - gas, home heating, utility bills - even higher is doubly evil.
Finally, it's worth it to note that while Evers squeezes us ever harder to build his Environmental Justice Empire, the foundation upon which he is building it is weaker that a rotted wood floor. The conversion from fossil fuel energy is decades and decades away, and that's optimistic. Thus a market-driven approach that both satisfies demand and protects consumers is the only sensible one, not a government-driven approach that bankrupts the state and the nation with imposed carbon caps.
To cite just one example, the switch from gasoline vehicles to electric ones is simply not doable right now, and, in fact, as with other environment energy "solutions," building them is highly detrimental to the environment.
Building electric cars requires vast minerals. Tesla batteries are mostly nickel and graphite and lithium. In particular, the mining of nickel, as does all sulfide mining, poses risks to the environment and health - a 2009 study revealed that the global warming potential of mining and processing nickel was the eighth highest of 63 metals over the previous year - and it's the mining of nickel and copper and cadmium that allows the EV industry to live.
And that's live, not thrive.
According to Mining.com, for Tesla to meet Elon Musk's goal of producing 20 million EVs a year, it would need 31 percent of all global nickel production in 2019; 94 percent of all mined graphites, 165 percent of all mined lithium, and 56 percent of all mined cobalt.
Or as writer Frik Els out it, Tesla would have to buy the entire output of the world's top six producers and it would still need more. Either that, or build 23 of its own mines at $8.5 billion each.
Just where is the environmental justice in all that? We'd like Tony Evers to answer that.
Evers may dream of reducing asthma among poor kids in smoggy downtown Milwaukee - a noble goal indeed - but doing so by destroying the state's economy and the standard of living of its people, by needlessly ravaging far-flung countries, and destroying the health of their communities and of their miners, is not nearly so noble.
Gov. Evers would do better at looking where the injustices are happening in the state. They are happening among school kids and young adults who have suffered from lockdowns and mask mandates; they are happening among farmers and small businesses still struggling from the pandemic meltdown; they are happening among people who must buy groceries and gas and heat, suffering unnecessarily from hypocrisy and a collectivist greed.
They are happening because Tony Evers has a perverted sense of justice and equity.
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