Or if we’d closed the ‘light truck’ loophole when it first reared its ugly head in the late 1980s, and kept increasing the CAFE standards, we would have also avoided that crisis.
What could have been done with those taxes is also important. While fuel taxes are used to build and maintain roads (and rightly so), any excess tax as suggested by ralph could have been used to provide better public transportation - trains, subways, bus service, etc. so that when fuel prices rise the public has an alternative to driving. For many people today, there really is no alternative to driving because no investment was made in public transportation. If that had been policy from the oil crisis of the 1970’s, I suspect that much of the country today would enjoy decent alternatives to driving. As others have pointed out, spending tens of thousands of dollars for a hybrid or fuel efficient car right now isn’t exactly a reasonable alternative.
Higher gas taxes in 2007 to curb demand that was forseeable in the 1970’s seems to be too little too late, but I could support it provided that the proceeds from that tax go towards providing alternatives to driving. Even then, we are looking at years to see any benefits from that. A tax as little as 5 to 10 cents per gallon over the last 30 years, specifically earmarked to build public transportation, would have been a far better solution. But hey, all taxes are bad, right?
Rather then a graduated gas tax, how about a graduated license tab tax. Any vehicle getting less then 20mpg has $200 added to the tabs. Any vehicle getting less then 10mpg gets $400 added. Base that on the MPG reported when it was new.
Any vehicle over 5 years old is exempt from this additional charge (to both make it simpler to keep track of all the models, and to cut a break to anyone driving an old car.)
All money collected from this tax goes to mass transit in the state it’s collected in.
Your numbers are too low in both amount and mpg cutoffs. $400 is not very much spread out over a year and few vehicles get under 10 mpg.
Maybe go:
> 40 mpg = 0 tax
30-40 = $200
20-30 = $400
10-20 = $800
< 10 mpg = $1200
**I would rather see it based on usage however. A flat fee seems unfair to me. **
Make it a few categories that are easy to handle at the pump and make it enough that it gives buyers an incentive to look for better MPG as a bigger part of their purchasing decision.
Jim
Devil is in the details. I agree, in theory (at least this part of it) wouldn’t be and insurmountable problem…except maybe for our domestic auto manufacturers I suppose.
With all the exceptions and grandfathering you’d have to do though, this would only effect new cars…and at a guess, there would still be loopholes in the language of the law as well. I just don’t think this is the best way to achieve what you are trying to here…but thats just my own opinion. Admittedly, this is probably the course the government will eventually take…so we can get back to this subject in a few years and see how it worked out. My bet is on…not very well.
-XT
The only way to really solve this problem is to change our built environment. As long as a large percentage of our population is dependent on cars for even the simplest tasks, we are going to be held hostage by the price of gas. If free market was allowed to operate so that we bore the true cost of driving, there would be plenty of support for changing our built environment.
In order to accomplish what you are suggesting would mean the end of the suburbs. I don’t believe that such a thing could be done in less than a 50 year time span. There is no infrastructure of public transportation that can support the suburbs, as we know them now.
I am assuming that you are speaking of the real cost of maintaining our roads and highways. These are vital not just for cars but also for our freight system. What works in densely packed countries like those in Europe and Japan will not work well in the spread out countries of North America or the Soviet Union.
In the meantime, we can work towards better-designed cities and strongly encourage more efficient cars and trucks while we need to maintain a large fleet of both.
Jim
Going from memory here…but according to a show I watched a few weeks ago, Walmart (the Mecca of all Evil!) plans to increase the efficiency of its logistics fleet by something like 1/3rd to 1/2 in the next few years. Thats a HUGE amount for such a large (and evil) company. (They are also looking at several pilot stores to test increasing store efficiency from a power generation standpoint…again, IIRC they want to make their stores use half to 2/3rd as much energy as they currently use).
You are right though…the US is not Europe, and mass transit is simply too expensive to impliment on a wide scale except in the cities. They are almost always economic losers in the US, again IIRC.
A better way for the US is going to be to step up research and development of whatever is going to be the next generation of personal transport…as well as increased development of some stop gap technologies like plug in hybrids and such. I don’t think that mandating fuel efficiency is the answer to either of those.
-XT
I hear this a lot, but I don’t buy it.
Let’s say this used SUV gets 15 MPG, and prices have plummeted so I can buy it for $5,000.
With demand up for fuel-efficient cars, the 30 MPG five-passenger vehicle is $10,000.
My commute is 10 miles round trip. That’s 50 miles a week, or 2,500 miles per year (assuming two weeks of vacation). There’s no mass transportation around here, and I’m not about to ride a bicycle on a state highway, so I’m pretty well stuck buying a car.
With the SUV, 2,500 miles uses 167 gallons of gas. At $5.00/gallon, that’s $835 per year.
With the fuel-efficient car, 2,500 miles uses 83 gallons. At $5.00/gallon, that’s $415 per year.
If I were really struggling for money, would I spend an extra $5,000 on a car to save $420 per year in gasoline? I doubt it, especially if I had to finance the $5,000 at used-car-loan interest rates.
That wouldn’t even make sense for someone with double or triple my commute.
How about a 4x10 work week. Only 4 days of rush hour traffic. It wouldn’t reduce pollutants by 20% but I’m sure it would be significant
Most of my friends claim their SUV’s get something like 10-13 MPG. I’m guessing that the ones that will plummet to $5000 are going to NOT be the ones that get 15+ MPG…but the older ones. My father, for instance, has a Suburban (1990 something) that gets a wooping 8 MPG…highway. Gods know what it gets in the city (luckily he drives the thing VERY rarely).
Sure…but how many people have a 10 mile round trip commute, and never drive their vehicle otherwise? I don’t. My commute (when I lived on the East coast) was something like 40 miles each way…and I know a LOT of folks doing that same commute (Southern Maryland to DC/Northern VA/Baltimore). And of course thats not all I use my vehicle for.
For YOU it might be cost effective…but you must realize that not everyone has the same situation you do…right? Hell, for that matter, if you are 5 miles from work, why do you need a vehicle at all except on poor weather days? Ride a friggin bike. 
Well, by now I’m sure you realize I could play with the numbers as well and get…well, lets see:
Say an average drive of 40 miles a day (I think thats a conservative average btw…I’m guessing people on average drive more than that, taking into account trips to the store, mall, to see friends, family, vacations, etc): 14600 miles per year. At 10 miles per gallon, thats 1460 gallons of gas a year. At $5.00/gallon thats $7300.00 per year.
For the fuel efficient car, lets say 40 miles a day at 40 miles per gallon: Thats 365 gallons a year. At $5.00 a gallon thats, um, $1825.00 per year. A substantial savings.
Even assuming you could get a relatively modern SUV for $5000 ( :dubious: ), you are still losing out money wise in the first year if your commute is more than the walk to work you have. Also, as I said earlier, if SUV’s are going to be coming on the market in large numbers, so will OTHER cars, as folks trade them in for more efficient models. For instance, I plan on buying a hybrid this fall and trading in my current vehicle. It gets 25 miles per gallon. I’m guessing I can get maybe $4000 at trade in for it…and someone may buy it from a dealer for around $5000. It seats 5 comfortable and 6 in a pinch. Why would someone on a tight or even fixed budge buy an gas guzzling SUV when they could get something like that…which even at your estimate gets 10 miles per gallon more?
None of this factors in maintenence and upkeep of course.
Well yeah…it would. See above. Even if we do the math at 15 miles per gallon you will end up losing in the end (somewhere in the second year off the top of my head…I can run the numbers for you if you like, but you can do it yourself to see). And I think your numbers are wildly optimistic both on how much a newer SUV is going to go for, on the fuel mileage of a used SUV, on average miles driven per day…on basically everything.
-XT
I agree with you that mandating fuel efficiency standards is silly. But so is manipulating the marketplace for a fungible commodity. Why not let the market respond naturally to increasing gas prices? Why inflate them artificially?
Fuel efficiency got better for sedans when they instituted the gas stickers.
The problem was that the auto industry got a waiver added for pickup trucks because they “were such a small part of the corporate fleet”. Well, that was their lucky day, because they suddenly decided to literally drive a new fleet of “work vehicles” through that loophole.
Why do they force soccer moms to by a huge expensive van instead of an affordable but regulated station wagon? Because the wagon counts toward the fleet total so they stopped making them.
Actually, fuel-efficiency standards worked quite well. From the 1950s to the 1970s, we had HUGE gains in fuel efficiency for cars. We already have extremely high gas taxes; I don’t see any evidence that it forces automakers to build more efficient cars. Regulations are what did that. The reason for the glut of SUVs now is that we failed to make the regulations apply to SUVs. They are classified as trucks, even though they are not used as trucks, and are exempt from the efficiency standards that apply to cars. Since the standards apply as an aggregate of all cars by each maker, they can produce as many gas-guzzling SUVs as they like without lowering the aggregate fuel efficiency for their cars. In effect, we virtually forced automakers to overproduce SUVs and then run massive advertising campaigns to convince consumers that they “need” an SUV.
Automakers are notoriously slow to respond to consumer demand. The most fuel-efficient cars are extremely hard to get, sometimes requiring waiting lists and paying thousands of dollars more than the list price. I went to a dealer to buy one of their most fuel-efficient models, and was told it was in “limited production” and that they were charging an extra $2,000 due to the demand for this car. Meanwhile, car lots are full of gas-guzzling SUVs that they can hardly give away. Given car companies’ poor track record of providing what people actually want, using consumer taxation as an indirect means to persuade car companies to make more fuel-efficient vehicles strikes me as a decidedly inefficient way to go about it.
[Oops, I didn’t see that RT already made the same point - sorry]
Because we are trying to solve at least two major problems with many ripple effects. Our current fleet of cars and trucks contribute to Global Warming and Smog problems and to our reliance on foreign oil. The market by itself will not and has not resolved this problem. Not all problems can be solved by Libertarian means.
Jim
I’m not entirely convinced the second is a very good reason (that’s a different thread), but environmental concerns might be enough to artificially ramp up progress. I’ll accept that.
Eight? My half-ton V10 truck gets better than that when I’m pulling a trailer full of horses!
I can see you carefully read my post before replying. Even during the season when riding a bike is a reasonable thing to do in Montana, I’m not going to ride it on a highway with no shoulders and cars whizzing by at 70 mph. That’s the only way into town.
We were talking specifically about low-income families. I think they’re more likely to shop close to home and to try to find housing near work.
Pardon me, but would you please pull out the newspaper and show me all of the 40mpg used cars?
Today, you can buy them easily for under $10K. You were the one that said prices would “plummet.”
I was using myself as an average, hence the miles per day. Looking at today’s paper, you can get a 10-year-old used SUV for $10K now, so after prices “plummet” I think $5K would be reasonable. I certainly hope $5.00/gallon isn’t “wildly optomistic.” I based the gas mileage of the used SUV on what my wife’s 7-year-old SUV gets.
Triple the miles per day and it still takes almost four years to break even.
Well honestly, I am trying to appeal to both the Greens and the Liberals and the Hawks/Defense minded. If you are trying to sell legislation that is going to affect most voters, you better make an appeal that will bring in different voters. 
As a green and a hawk, I believe both a good reasons. We have a shortage of hawks among the posters, so on this board the second argument is weak, but it is how I typically explain the situation to people.
The Smog problem is a very visible and measurable one, so many inner city kids suffer from asthma and the cause and effect is very well documented. So smog becomes a very liberal issue among those that are looking out for the poor/minorities. The smog and global warming concerns are very big to greens and my primary concerns. The reliance of foreign oil weakens us in case of a long major war.
Jim
If you buy a small car do you have to smash into a SUV. ? I have had lots of small cars in my time and never hit anything.
A tax rebate would be how you work around the gas increase.
Well, what can I say? Lucky you. 
I read your post…I was saying that if (a generic) someone has basically a 5 mile commute to work, they should ride a bike. It was a joke. Most people I know don’t have such a small commute…and I know plenty of folks who are in the ‘low income’ bracket. even if they DO, its 5 miles of city driving…which usually means it takes them 30 or 40 minutes in heavy traffic to drive that 5 miles.
Thats an assumption you are making that I don’t believe reflects the real world. Low income people have to commute like other people. A lot of times (good) stores (and certainly malls) aren’t convinently located in their neighborhoods.
You are of course excused. On the other hand, I was talking about NEW cars with the 40 MPG thingy. I.E. people are going to trade up their older cars (and SUV’s) for new ones that get better gas mileage.
I see however that I missed your own point earlier…you were talking about a used SUV vs a used car that gets slightly better gas mileage. Of couse, per my own example you can get a car today that gets 10-15 miles a gallon more than your theoretical SUV at the same price…so why wouldn’t you?
I still think the point stands that in realistic driving a good used car (such as my own example which gets 25-30 miles per gallon for $4-5,000) is going to be better than a used SUV getting 10-15 MPG…unless you get the SUV for free.
I haven’t seen any SUV’s that aren’t at least 5 years old or older that you can get at that price…not here anyway. Maybe where you are from its different.
Of course, the older one’s get worse gas mileage than the new ones do, generally speaking.
$5 per gallon will probably be realistic…for the next 2 years (thats my guess). I seriously doubt SUV prices will drop much in that time (certainly not half the price they are today). And as you say, its for a 10 year old SUV…whats the mileage on that? I mean the city mileage, not the highway? As I said, my dad’s SUV is like 10-15 years old at this point…and it literally gets 8 miles per gallon on the road…and something less in the city.
Out of curiosity, what kind of SUV does your wife have? What kind of driving does she do? Is it mostly suburban/highway type driving, or the stop and go driving in a big city?
Only if everyone does the same type of driving you do. Triple the city miles and its even worse. Unless we are talknig about the rural poor, you also have factors like finding a parking place for those monsters.
I seriously don’t think that most poor people are going to rush out and buy an SUV when they can simply buy a car.
-XT