From the employee side, an easy-to-use calculator for commuting expenses could help. The monetary incentive is there for choosing a remote position, but people don't always know what it is, especially with car commuting.
Ask essentially any at least minimally competent expert in economics and they'll tell you it doesn't matter who hands the money to the government (although they might call it the relative elasticity of supply and demand dictating tax incidence). They may all be wrong, but your phrasing gives me the impression you haven't considered this and came up with a good counterargument.