Blog: Obama's Mandatory Black Box on Cars

Statement

How far did you drive last week? How fast did you go? Did you exceed the speed limit, even once?

You may not know the answers to these questions, but soon President Obama's Administration will know.

President Obama's Administration, in the form of The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is requiring every car sold in the United States to have an "event data recorder" - similar to those found in aircraft - in order to monitor your driving habits, and provide a snapshot of the final moment of impact if the car crashes.

The snapshot will be able to be viewed by law enforcement, insurance companies and automakers, but you will not be able to turn it on or off.

NHTSA says the purpose is to gather data from crash incidents in order to learn how to improve safety. But a proposed "per-mile" tax from the Obama Administration's Department of Transportation (DOT) may be the real motivator.

Earlier this year, President Obama's DOT drafted legislation to tax American drivers for every mile driven. The Obama Administration even outlined a new government agency - "The Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office" - to figure out just how to implement such a tax.

But how could President Obama's bureaucrats know how far you've driven and how much additional tax you owe? Thus the real need for the now mandatory "black box."

Where will the Obama bureaucrats stop with this newfound personal data? Would they establish a new national penalty for what they deem excessive speed? How about accelerating too fast? What about a penalty for poor gas mileage? Is the return of the national 55 mile-per-hour speed limits with an automatic assessment of a federal penalty far away?

Additional personal information collected and housed by Big Brother Obama will inevitably lead to the desire for Washington to control even more aspects of our once private lives.

Perversely, the one area of "success" of President Obama's economic-environmental plan has been to drive up motoring costs in order to foster "alternative" energy and lifestyles. His pursuit of higher gas taxes is expected to wildly increase the tax from $1.82 per gallon, when he took office, to an expected $5.00 per gallon later this summer.

Obama Administration bureaucrats may think higher gas prices are virtuous, as they commute from their high-priced leafy suburbs in Maryland and Virginia via money losing and massively taxpayer subsidized public transit. But here in Nevada - and especially northern Nevada - we often drive long distances, at high speeds, in big cars and trucks as a daily routine necessary to provide for our families and to build our businesses.

As your Congressman, I will work to reverse the Obama Administration's mandate for "black boxes" in cars, specifically allowing any American to disengage the device. I will aggressively oppose a per-mile Federal tax on drivers. And I will support the expansion of domestic drilling for oil and gas, including the vast oil reserves in Alaska and off our shores, where states want to drill.

Expansion of our domestic energy reserves will not only create thousands of new jobs, reduce our nation's foreign-trade deficit, and keep us from further funding both sides of the war on terror through petrodollars going to terrorist-friendly countries, it will add to our national treasury, and help us to balance the federal budget.

And that's the big difference between where I stand as a candidate for Congress verses my Democratic opponents and the Obama Administration. They may think Washington, D.C. needs to know more about you and your family's activities, so they can drill deeper into your pockets. I want to encourage entrepreneurial America to drill deeper in search of more energy, and to create more jobs to add to our national economic expansion, not Washington, D.C.'s bloated bureaucracy.

Rather than mandating black boxes for Big Brother to monitor us, let's free entrepreneurial Americans from bureaucratic mandates so we can bring our Nevada businesses back into the black

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