Coming Soon: An Evil Method to Tax Motorists!
The AP is running a story about the Feds contemplating moving from a gasoline tax to a miles travelled tax. This is the worst idea, ever. Everything we're working for is hurt by this.
- It would remove consumer incentives to get more fuel efficient vehicles, since they would be taxed at the same rate regardless.
- The tax devices must be unhackable by citizens even when they have complete physical access to the device. Recall that the music and film industries have sunk billions into creating secure hardware like this, and every time they've tried the devices have been cracked in a matter of months. And that's the 'elite' private sector. When you get to the public sector, think of how well those electronic voting machines are working out for us!
- There are valid privacy concerns with GPS devices tagging citizen's travels.
<sarcasm>The upside is that all those wicked early adopters that convert from gasoline powered vehicles to more efficient power plants will no longer be loopholed into getting free roads. My neighbor is one of them - real tax weasler, her, with her Prius that cost her thousands more, just so she could spew a little less CO-two. We must absolutely make sure that these people pay their fair share of taxes after taking affirmative action to help our air quality and energy independence - cutting them some slack would be unfair. Otherwise, people might want to follow in their footsteps.</sarcasm>
Here's a little concept I've been working on: Tax each road user proportional to the damage they do to the road. For cars this is simply not much, and roughly proportional to fuel consumption. But for big trucks its another matter: damage goes with weight to the fifth power, that means taxing them heavily, because they are chewing up our roads just as heavily.
This in turn will lead to an exodus of freight onto railroads for all but the last mile of travel, and then our highway system might actually become solvent, instead of being a black hole that swallows up the general fund.
Or just hike the gas tax. That'd be fine too.
Comments
Am I naive?
I thought using less gas was a good thing, spewing less CO2 was a good thing. Why isn't a Prius a good thing?
Maybe instead of taxing gas, you should tax cars per se. It is already done, but it could be by odometer in addition to the resale value of the car. Taxing miles gets people onto public transportation, it is hoped; so what's wrong with that? Isn't that the point?
Odometers could be made harder to change, like black boxes on planes. Reading the odometer could be done when you get your annual polution exhaust check (which we should reinstate.) Extra car taxes could go towards expanding public transit.
Here's my two cents worth for pie in the sky!
I added <sarcasm> tags to
I added <sarcasm> tags to make this more clear.
We have no problem to tax cars. Far from it - cars are not currently paying their actual costs in terms of environmental degredation and person-killing. However, moving away from a gasoline tax to a flat tax that taxes all cars equally is the exact opposite of the way we want to go. In case they haven't noticed, we're in a bit of a scrap here with Energy Independence and Climate Crisis. Taxing at a rate proportional to gasoline is going to get big cars off the road and allow small cars to flourish. Taxing at a fixed rate may get lots of cars off the road too - because 1 billion people will have to swim to work every day. There are good ways and bad ways to do it.