The presumption in your question is that taxes are levied to address a specific need. And by-and-large, this is how taxes are “sold” to the general public. IMO, however, the government’s real goal is to simply get the money, and they look for any justification (real or imaginary) to get it.
Government is a beast with an insatiable appetite for cash. It needs to be kept well fed in order to survive…
Fair enough—but why would a mileage tax affect congestion? Congestion comes from people being in the same place at the same time rather than how far they go to get there.
I was really just wanting to pimp the fact that to affect behavior, the behavior needs to be taxed on the margin. If being downtown at 5:05 pm adds to congestion, then we would want to make people internalize the cost they add to others (by increasing congestion) from doing so. I guess I’m not so sure how a mileage tax would accomplish that.
Well, I’m not going to agree w/ you on the role of government. I will agree w/ you that taxing for the purposes of generating revenue is often the case when taxes such as so-called sin taxes are levied. However, I’ve never been convinced that markets can solve market failures, and it is perfectly reasonable for the state to attempt to make actors internalize costs they impose on others. Why not kill two birds w/ one stone?
js and Shalmanese: I don’t believe mileage tax would be effective at curbing congestion, IF it were implemented without regards to the location. In fact, without location-specific coding it would be even worse than fuel, because you’d be taxed more to drive thru congestion than thru smooth sailing, mile-wise under a fuel tax.
However, with transponders, you could target the tax based on location and heck, even time of day. You could make rush hour more expensive for instance.
In fact, I think this is a wonderful idea, even better than my #3 idea, but for the civil rights aspect of it.
California, which desperately wants to reduce air pollution, is going to impose a tax that removes the financial incentive to purchase a vechicle that travels more miles on less pollutants? The idea is, to be perfectly blunt, insane. If California is facing a shortfall due to increased gas mileage, what they need to do is increase the gas price.
This is a sop to everyone who commutes the 80 miles from Antelope Valley to downtown LA in an SUV. The current tax is, in many cases, completely avoidable (drive a smaller car). Don’t start in on the “it hurts the poor”. The working poor in SoCal drive tiny shoebox cars - cars that get 30 to 40 miles to the gallon. There are many of us (the OP and myself, for instance) who, on occasion, need a large heavy vehicle, but, if memory serves, the OP uses as a primary means of transportation a vehicle that gets 35 mpg. If one needs a large automobile to transport things, one ought to be willing to pay the extra costs (or perhaps one does not, in fact, need the large automobile).
This does hurt rural consumers, who presumably get gas mileage that does not include sitting at an idle for 25% of the trip; a gas tax counts, albeit ineffectively, the time spent sitting at stop lights, etc, v. the mileage tax, which would count time spent zipping along highway 114 as equal to crawling along Wislhire blvd at rushhour.
In SoCal, at least, the goals of the gas tax are many. Fund repair of the roads. Garner income for the state. Discourage further air pollution. Internalize the costs of driving. A gas tax does **EVERY ONE OF THOSE THINGS ** better than a mileage tax does, and it does it inexpensively.
There may come a day when a significant number of cars are powered by e.g. batteries, and the gas tax is an inefficent way of handling the problem. When that day comes, we can discuss mileage taxes.
Spending Billions of dollars to avoid the difficulty of selling a tax increase to the voters is simply insane.
Congestion is only a self-limiting process in that eventually, you can’t cram more cars on the road, but the optimum number of cars on a road is not neccesarily the maximum number of cars. Up to a certain density, traffic moves along relatively smoothly and there is reasonable efficiency on the roads. However, once you move beyond that, efficiency drops dramatically as gridlocks start occuring and trafic snarls entangle even more cars which leads to even more congestion which leads to 3 hour traffic jams. Being able to prevent such snarls has been unachievable until very recently.
I think the case of london proves that it is at least possible, if sensibly done for a differential, fine grained pricing scheme to have quite a significant impact on driver behaviour.
The YZF-R1 gets about 40 mpg. The XJ600 gets about 50 mpg. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that the PNW has something called a ‘riding season’. I rode the YZF-R1 for the first time in months (had to use booster cables to start it) on Wednesday. Not too bad during the day; but the seat had frost on it when I deaded home, and by the time I got home my fingertips were burning with cold and my cheeks were nearly numb.
My primary means of transportation is my Jeep Cherokee, which only gets about 20-22 mpg if driven reasonably carefully. When my MGB is restored (opleaseopleaseoplease) I expect it to get mileage in the mid-20s. If I get a good job (right now I’m looking for just about any job) I want something more efficient to replace the Jeep.
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.]
The YZF-R1 gets about 40 mpg. The XJ600 gets about 50 mpg.
[QUOTE]
I did a lot of in-city driving; idling at stop lights followed by jack-rabbit starts so I could be the first at the next red light. On the freeway I probably got about that.
Yeah, so does Toronto. If it falls on a weekend, we all go for a ride. Okay, it’s not that bad, but it isn’t the 300 days a year I was used to.
My point remains that, while you need from time to time a large car, you do what you can to avoid the cost of gasoline (taxes and pollution). The mileage tax takes away some (25%, roughly) of the incentive to do that. That’s bad.
I got my XJ600 new in 1994. It has about 80,000 miles on it which works out to a bit under 9,000 miles per year. I bought my R1 new in July or August 2003. It has less than 5,000 miles on it. In the last 14 months, I’ve put only a couple hundred miles on it.
I agree.
I couldn’t help think of this some more, and how bad an idea this is all around. People who live in farm country really need to move long distances as nothing is close by (sometimes the mailbox is a good 1/4 mi away). These peoplelive in good air areas in general and don’t crowd roads (as they don’t live in congested areas). They typcially don’t make as much as city folk, and can least afford it.
Now OTHO you have the city deweler who has about a 2 mile commute, who hops on the highway and manages to merge to the left lane and back again is about a mile to exit at the next exit. This person is usually in a bad air area, has the car moving at low speeds, and contrubutes greatly to congestion. Taxing him per mile is not going to impact his driving much because he doesn’t go far.
The concept is so ridiculous as to completely transcend reality. Asking people to spend money on a GPS so they can restructure taxes is a complete waste of money. Current gasoline taxes are already a user-fee tax. The more you drive the more tax money you pay. The tax requires no internal collection structure beyond that of a sales tax. It is easily adjusted up or down as needed. A GPS based system would require the cost of a GPS plus a subscriber fee plus a collection agency. This would cost citizens extra money before any NEW tax is generated. On top of this, it is a penalty to the tree-hugging environmentalist who actually bought a fuel-efficient car. Way to go Oregon.
This is an example of how dangerous politicians can be when they have nothing to do. On the flip side, Ohio is trying to decide if they want to renew their E-check contract. Politicians have actually put a little thought into the concept that taking $10 every year from a portion of the population does nothing to clean the air and everything to piss off the people stuck with it. It would be better if they just enacted a $5/year tax statewide and applied it to pollution problems instead of a workfare program. Sigh…
The more I think about it, the more I think this is the case. The only way it makes sense is if one asks, “cuo bono”, latin for “how does this benefit me?”
The painfully obvious thing to do is to raise gas taxes to make up for the lost revenue. That politicians are not taking that step implies that there is some reason for them not to take the blindingly obvious step.
The simple reason is that it would hurt the wrong voters. Tree hugging environmentalists only have one or two people to vote for (either democrat or green), and they really can’t change. We can completely ignore them.
If one raises gas taxes, who gets hurt? Commuters and primary cargivers - the dreaded soccer mom contingent. They will notice, and complain about, the higher price of gas for the mini-van, etc. They can change their vote, and can be depended upon, in large numbers, to vote for whomever gives them lower taxes.
Who will be hurt? Environmentalists, those people who paid a premium for extremely fuel efficient cars, and rural types (and the untold generations who might have enjoyed cleaner air and some remaining fossil fuels, but they don’t vote, now do they?). They are outnumbered and out-voted by those who, well, commute or run carpools.
I’d be for this tax if it were administered as a luxury tax.
If wage slaves could exempt their commutes; if couriers and taxis and travelling sales reps, and truckers and bus companies could get exemptions for all their necessary travel, then I’d be for a tax that soaks “leisure” miles only.
However, I don’t see how, without super-expensive technologies and large enforcement bureaucracies to keep business mile logs honest, you can make this work.
I’d also support corresponding decreases in gas taxes, though we in Nebraska have been waiting since 1967 for the promised decreases in property taxes that the sales and income taxes were supposed to bring; so fat chance of a gas tax reduction as the result of a mileage tax.