Training Wheels for Congressmen?

What, another Pacific Northwest legislator with daffy ideas about taxation and the environment? I could open up a whole new blog about these nincompoops...

It was only a few weeks ago when we covered the scintillating idea from Oregon’s elected officials that people who drive hybrid cars should be taxed more. Their neighbor to the north has not been idle, however, and now Washington state Representative Ed Orcutt has fired a fresh salvo against rationality from more or less the same type of artillery.

Did you know that bicycling causes pollution? His logic is inescapable:
Carbon dioxide is a pollutant.
We exhale more carbon dioxide when we engage in exercise, such as bicycling.
Therefore to address this we should tax people who ride bikes.

...I’ll pause to let that argument dribble back out of your ears and form a confusing puddle on the ground.

It’s almost breathtaking in its simplicity, or rather, simplemindedness. In fact it harkens back to the glory days of political acrobatics in support of environmentally misguided ideas - the 1980s, which included such gems as “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do” (from no less an elected official than President Ronald Reagan)

It’s worth noting that Rep. Orcutt has apologized for his Email, and he claims to have always understood that cycling emits far less carbon than driving (though at first he said he hadn’t “done any analysis” of the difference)

But my concern here is not for the offense given, or whether or not he actually wants to tax bike riding (another issue he disputes in the apology), but for the very idea that he could have somehow come up with this argument under any circumstances short of being struck on the head by a cartoon bowling ball.

Seriously, I’ve seen genital warts with a better grasp of reason. This would be a great joke if it wasn’t actually happening… democracy has some very deep, fundamental, and painfully entrenched flaws. Just another reason why we are doomed.