After a trip to Holmes Cycling, he made a purchase and indeed did bike to work every day. Even in the snow! When doing our taxes that year, I wrote off his cycling expenses (which were a drop in the bucket), and Turbotax kindly alerted me to the fact that if we'd bought a hybrid car, we would have received a substantial tax credit for "going green."
Soooooooo... if we'd created MORE pollution by buying a second vehicle, we would have been able to keep more of our own money, but for REALLY going green and using NO fuel by biking, we had to contribute relatively more funding to our government.
Moral of the story: Our government has designed a tax system which allows its citizens to keep their money ONLY if they've spent it on federally approved purchases first. But not if they have an individual solution that involves hard work.
