Tea Party voters in my town are pretty sick of the Tea Party.

[jmowreader]

57. No, it wouldn't

First things first: there's no sales tax on diesel, and there's no way you could legally burn 100,000 gallons of it per year in one truck. (It comes out to running the truck about 1600 miles per 24-hour period, every day of the year.) But that's a small thing.

The big thing is, no matter how much tax revenue this puts out (also consider: every dollar a company spends on one tax is a dollar they get to deduct from their income tax), it doesn't solve the problem of the diesel in the aquifer, the torn-up roads or the other intangible item: because there is not an unlimited amount of trade for any business, every time someone starts a business in a line of work that other people are already doing, the amount of revenue flowing to those other people necessarily decreases. (Let's use the trucking company example. Our guy has 100 trucks. Assume he gets each driver one 500-mile load per day, so he needs 600 loads a week to keep everyone moving. Unless our guy ALSO builds a factory to make the property he is hauling, he has to take that freight away from other trucking companies. Hence, every dollar of income and every gallon of fuel that our guy pays taxes on is a dollar and a gallon that Swift Transportation or JB Hunt will not be paying taxes on.)

Money isn't everything.