Last week Senator Ed Hooper (R-Clearwater), a onetime moderate who I happened to somewhat like as a House member continued his drift into DeSantistan with an absolutely ridiculous proposal meant to “own the libs” and social engineer using the largess of government – something Florida GOPers have become experts at.

In addition to regular vehicle registration fees, Hooper’s measure would add a $200 use fee (IE. TAX) for registering an electric vehicle. So EV owners like myself can expect our taxes to go up here in the “free state of Florida.”

Senator Hooper claims his issue is based around fairness since Florida is heavily-dependent on regressive taxes like the gas tax and sales tax to fund a growing state government footprint under GOP rule. Hooper might be right on that, but instead maybe we could try promoting mass transit instead of constantly building new roads to keep up with out-of-control sprawlish growth?

But more importantly this is another punitive measure among so many others by the Florida GOP aimed at social engineering. The petroleum industry doesn’t like EV’s and Florida GOPers these days like to blame everything from auto workers insufficient pay to insurance rate hikes on the “wokeism” of us evil anti-American environmentalists (I am not sure how environmentalism is woke, but that further illustrates the whole “woke” thing is a catch-all phrase for anything DeSantistans don’t like) so let’s make it cost prohibitive to buy and operate an EV in Florida. This can also stick it to the Biden Administration.