Our ignorance permits government mistakes and heinous fees
By NEVAEH KARRAKER — nakarraker@ucdavis.edu
By now, the controversies surrounding United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are plastered on every news outlet’s front page. Every day a new story transpires and another protest assembles, but information about state affairs gets lost in the chaos.
Voting on state bills is just as important as voting in presidential elections — and in the same way, we need to be aware of the things that occur in the state we live in. This is not to say that we should disregard national events, but that allowing them to consume our focus permits legislators to take advantage of their constituent’s diverted attention.
On Jan. 29, 2026, California Assembly Bill 1421 (AB1421) passed. While it hasn’t garnered a lot of media coverage, the little attention it has received was heavy criticism and panic over the gas mileage tax. Democratic Assembly members Lori Wilson, Cecelia Aguiar-Curry and Blanca Rubio have disproved misconceptions in a KCRA interview with Wilson. Wilson stated that the proposal doesn’t create a new tax, but is a continuation of a 2012 study on declining fuel revenues with the alternative of electric vehicle (EV) usage.
The problem is that switching to clean-energy transportation with EV usage results in a decrease in gas purchasing, and thus a decrease in tax revenue for road repairs or other related issues. Thus, a proposed solution is a gas mileage tax — a tax on drivers per mile.
However, we don’t have enough information to adequately outline this tax. While imposing an expensive registration fee or a gas mileage tax on only EV drivers seems like a good solution, double-taxing acts as a punishment for EV drivers and discourages consumers from purchasing EVs. On the other hand, taxing the low and middle class — people with families commuting to work and school — isn’t viable or just. It would cause this group to also be double-taxed: punished for simply having a family or working to support them.
While AB1421 does not actually impose any tax, the purpose of the study is to collect enough data to draft a proposal, which is set to be revisited in 2027. The people are right to be outraged; California already has one of the highest gas tax prices in the nation (currently at 61.2 cents per gallon), along with a tax on car registration and insurance, so charging an additional tax per mile driven seems outrageous.
Wilson, in the interview, discussed a possible tax discount for the low and middle classes, but even so, this proposal is a harmful policy. If lawmakers truly cared about the well-being of the people, they would not treat us as experiments and create new taxes as a solution to a failing program — they’d reevaluate the state budget (and hence, the state’s budgeting methods) to allocate funding more effectively for modern circumstances. Further, while studies can be incredibly informative, there’s a fine line between collecting data for a solution and treating people as test subjects.
California isn’t the only state facing this dilemma, but other states have reached more fair and effective solutions. Florida, the state with the second highest number of registered EVs, relies on the redistribution of sales tax on electricity to replace the declining revenue from fuel tax. Other southern states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Iowa and Oklahoma have also imposed taxes on electricity.
The real concern is not who the gas mileage tax should target, but where those funds are funneled. Some of the revenue may go to transportation and road construction; at the same time, there also exists a mysterious tax surcharge in California totalling $59 billion since 2015 — a tax that’s implemented after all necessary taxes and programs are accounted for.
It doesn’t seem like the true consequential problem is in fuel taxes, but rather in the fact that California is bad at budgeting — an issue that’s not exclusive to the Transportation Department. The California High-Speed Rail, for example, has increased their budget astronomically to $128 billion from the original promised $34 billion. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance embarrassingly miscalculated $165 billion in revenue tax, burying California in intergenerational debt.
When a family undergoes financial difficulties, a budget is strictly implemented and adhered to. When the government undergoes financial difficulties, the solution is always to tax the people; to suck hard-earned money out of its citizens to fix avoidable mistakes or fund questionable projects. We aren’t paying enough attention to the things occurring in front of our very eyes, in the very cities we live in. Awareness of national events is important, but don’t neglect the state ones: it’s the reason why these mistakes by legislators are continuously repeated.
Written by: Nevaeh Karraker—nakarraker@ucdavis.edu
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.
