Since a lot of your folks are too young to remember...

The watch Jobs is wearing appears to be an LED digital watch. Because LED displays drained the battery a lot quicker than LCD watches (which came later), you had to press a button to see the time. In retrospect, this is kind of a feature, because when the display was off the face was completely dark and mysterious. It was like Darth Vader's watch.

The Qur'an instructs believers to go to war against Jews and Christians.

The Bible records the history of wars.

There's a difference between recording a violent history, and instructions to commit violent acts.

The Qur'an has no order to love your neighbor, to treat others as one would wish to be treated, or to not resist an evil man. The Qur'an's plan for peace is to obtain it by force.

Starfleet HQ is in San Fran.

So basically, it's Arlington, VA if you compare it to the USA.

Leaving aside the fact that your plan is to punish success, destroy incentive, and force people who are successful to hide their money ... taxing "wealth" is such a capricious activity that it, even more than the current system, is essentially designed to be divisive. As it stands, the wealthy people pay the vast majority of the income taxes, and the poorer HALF of the country pays essentially no income tax at all. You're proposing that every year you take away some of a successful person's assets until they are as poor as the lower half, right? Or would you just keep taking some of everyone's assets, every year, until nobody has anything left?

Your goal, rather than doing any of the things that actually create prosperity, is to simply tear down anything successful in the name of resentment. Which also happens to kill the goose laying the golden tax revenue egg that currently pays the bills.

Slashdot is dying. Or maybe I'm just dying. Maybe both. We're all dying.

Not until Netcraft confirms it.

I have enough Karma for a bonus, but curiously, the checkbox no longer works and has not for a few years. I post at +1 whether it is checked or not.

Nonsense.

The employer personally uses the road to drive to his business. Done.

The employees use the road the same way. Done.

The business' customers also use the road the same way (when visiting that store). Done.

All of them spend a bit of time on the road, and pay taxes on the fuel they burn in order to pay for the service of having the road available to them.

When the business owner receives a shipment of new shoes, he's paying the freight company (or his supplier is, and passing that cost along in one way or another) to make that delivery. That's a different use of the road. Big rigs and busy commercial operators are (in most places) taxed differently because they are buying a different class of service from the city, county, state, or federal agency that maintains the road they're using. The business owner picks up a portion of that higher wear-and-tear cost by being a paying customer of the freight company that is being taxed based on their heavy vehicles/use.

Your world view, which includes the government being involved in the running of the shoe store and going over everyone's books to decide when a shoe sale is profitable so that the shoe store owner (who may actually lose money that year, even while his employees earn taxable income) can be capriciously taxed at a much higher rate as he drives his Hyundai the same 5 miles to work as his sales people, is just a thinly veiled dose of contempt for people who own businesses. The guy is already paying property taxes as he locates and operates his store, and countless other fees.

You want to use MORE tax dollars to keep a running tally on what percentage of the value of a road's use is reflected in the ebbing and flowing profitability of all of the businesses that might be located somewhere along or connected to a given municipality's various types of roads? Wow, it's a Progressive's wet dream! That would require enormous numbers of new bureaucrats, funded by whole new tax schemes, just to allow that to (badly) take place. All so that you punish the business owner, or his better-than-average sales person, for making more money than someone else at the end of exactly the same commute.

Even if your fantasy of "percentage of value" could EVER be calculated as millions of people and businesses use the roads in different ways on different days, what would be the point? I know: your point is that you don't like the idea of government being thought of as a service provider, you like it when they are directly involved in people's personal business decision making, as a forced partner in their budgeting and profit considerations. All of this in the service of what ... trying to prop up the false picture of prosperity as a fixed pie, with the government's role being the arbiter of slice sizes in the name of Social Justice? Please. Your attempt to hide a confiscatory/redistributionist agenda behind a loopy road value formula based on impossibly intrusive and subjective measurements of personal achievement is just laughable. Or would be if it didn't represent such a toxic wider philosophy.

Who cares? Because if you do 20k miles across the state line, you're going to be paying $6,000 to the state for activity you didn't conduct there. I don't care if it's the opposite for some other guy. I would care that this year, presto, my disposable income just dropped by $6,000 for no good reason.

There should be no jobs that don't allow for the worker to be self-sufficient.

How about minors? Do they need to be self-sufficient?

So? The government is providing a service: a way for both the owner and the employee (and the customers, and the vendors/contractors, and the police if they're needed, etc) to get to that restaurant. If you use that service (by driving on the road), you should pay some amount towards the maintenance of the road. Why someone is using the road should be absolutely none of your business, or the government's. Your notion that road taxes should be higher if you make more money than someone when you get where you're going is ... preposterous.

What about two shoe salesmen who drive down the same road to the same store to go to work? One is a poor communicator, never takes a shower, and can never seem to handle more than one customer at a time. His co-worker has his act together, and customers respond well by buying more shoes. He makes three times the commission, which translates to a much better income. You're suggesting that he (the better shoe salesman) should be charged more to use the same road because he's not a lazy idiot. Smart? Productive? Eeeeevil! Quick, tax that evil person for being more productive! Utter foolishness, and I'd just laugh it off ... but you just provided another case study in everything that's wrong with the lefty view of economics and prosperity.

What if you put 90% of the year's miles on while doing a road trip that takes you out of Oregon?

Many states, like New Jersey, have tightened their "child labor" laws such that it is impractical or prohibited to hire minors. Government has, once again, created a problem, blamed the people for it, and claimed to have the solution.

Just like Radio Shack (self inflicted wounds). But Enron and Arthur Anderson were killed for real by courts, because of their conduct. Death sentences, basically, whether they were going to die of their own wounds eventually or not.

Should also tell that to the service members who are killed or injured in (by comparison) quite frequent helicopter mis-haps? We're talking about crashes and hard landings in aircraft that have long, long histories of service. Shit happens when you're trying to land a big heavy machine with spinning rotors - happens with fixed-wing aircraft, too.

It's funny how progressives use percentages when it benefits them. Big Oil has been getting single-digit profit margins for many years, but all the progressives could point out when they wanted to make a money grab was "millions of dollars". Yes, a single-digit percentage of billions in sales is indeed millions.

You really want to hold up Walmart, the leftist's favorite punching bag, as a good example? That's exactly where the ire of the left (mostly for unions, who want in) is focused.