To the editor:
Jason Muller’s “End the clean car surtax” is one of those letters to the editor likely to be influential because it calls out a city hall determined to virtue signal on the environment.
The Democratic Party, with a few noteworthy exceptions, such as the senior senator from neighboring West Virginia, has signed onto the environmentalist agenda and is determined to subsidize desired environmental behavior, e.g., federal electric vehicle subsidies, and tax undesired behavior, e.g., using plastic grocery bags. Democrats at the federal level have perverted the tax system to subsidize electric vehicle purchases, charging stations, etc.
There is no reason to anticipate Alexandria’s city hall will not do likewise. Soon, city hall will be looking the other way as pedestrians find themselves tripping over electrical cords crossing the public right-of-way so residents without driveways can charge their electric vehicles parked in front of their homes. Electric vehicle owners may even persuade city hall to reserve the parking space in front of their homes for this purpose.
Most likely city hall will decide to deduct the federal income tax credit from the electric vehicle’s retail value, as the letter to the editor implicitly requests. Virginia’s local and state automobile tax covers costs of maintaining roadways for vehicular access. Maintenance needs are largely driven by vehicle weight, so, since electric vehicles outweigh traditional vehicles, as pointed out here: www.motorhills.com/7- reasons-why-electric-cars-are-so-heavy/, they put more wear-and-tear on our roadways. Reducing the local tax on them will result in either a reduction in road maintenance or redirection of other tax revenue to road maintenance or an increase in the overall vehicle tax rate.
Electric vehicles are the sort of virtue-signaling shell game liberal politicians can play with environmental advocates because a shift to electric vehicles will spike demand for electricity, the majority of which is generated with nuclear or fossil fuels. A younger generation of environmental advocates might be open to giving nuclear electricity generation a second look, but too many older advocates remember the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plant catastrophes, leaving fossil fuels as the most likely generation source because wind and solar are incredibly expensive and their worn-out components cannot be readily recycled.
Fossil fuel pollution will not really be remedied, merely shifted to a different locale and an earlier stage in the energy life cycle, while virtue-signaling politicians pat themselves on the back.
-Dino Drudi, Alexandria
