Lummis Calls Mileage Tax Unfair [AUDIO]

A proposal designed to increase revenue for federal transportation projects calls for taxing drivers based on mileage.

The Congressional Budget Office released its report with the mileage tax option last week.

Wyoming's U.S. Representative Cynthia Lummis, in an interview with Fox News, calls the idea terrible.

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Representative Lummis says the idea of a mileage tax is especially unfair for anyone living in a rural state where daily driving can quickly rack up miles.

"The average year I drive between 30 and 40 thousand miles in Wyoming. Its typical for us to drive 100 miles to a doctor, to a shopping center, to business."

Lummis sees the proposal as an example of big-city lawmakers looking for solutions without thinking about the impact on rural populations.

Proposals for over 500 billion in new transportation projects, Lummis says, are dollars taken away from highway maintenance, and that she says is the problem..

"So we need to look at the spending side and we also need to look at things like toll-roads and the gas taxes that we pay."

The CBO report says, new technologies make mileage tracking a possibility.

A mileage tax would hit drivers of energy efficient models making up for the gas taxes they’re no longer paying. A CBS money watch report notes the irony if gas efficient cars-subsidized by the government- lead to a loss in gas tax revenue that in turn needs to be made up by the federal government in a new tax.