Tax, Tax, Tax.

Place a new tax on new tires.....the larger the tire size; the higher the tax. After all, large trucks tear up the roads! I also agree in raising the gas tax.

 

A tire tax sounds like a neat solution, but there is a potential safety issue. Increase the price too much, and people will put off getting tires. Possibly past the point of affecting safe handling.

 

Up to a point were people will be obligated to replace them upon mandatory state's emissions and safety inspections

 

Which vary in interval. Maryland only has one, when the car is registered.

 

Yes, but during these initial years of trying to build the EV market it doesn't really make sense to send mixed signals to buyers...buy an EV get a rebate...and an extra tax. And in reality most EVs and PHEVs are realtively smaller and lighter than most other cars so cause less damage.

An, exactly how do you tax a PHEV? One person drives 90% HV and 10% EV, so is already paying gas taxes on 90% of their miles and another person is driving 50% HV and 50% EV and only paying gas taxes on 50% of their miles...an odometer reading doesn't account for this.

And EVs do not emit anything from the tailpipe. (Sure there is some smog forming pollutants emitted somewhere else, but it is almost certainly less and it is a benefit to get it out of the dense city areas. So shouldn't we tax all tail pipe emitters for this? Let's just not tax EVs per mile at all instead for 5-10 years and increase gas taxes to compensate for the few EVs there are.

Mike

 

Sorry to reply to this thread after it has gone cold but. If we tax people per mile driven, then people will drive less. Who will pay for the roads then?
If we tax people at the time of yearly registration, then you have paid to play, if you don't play much too bad, if you play a lot then great for you and the economy.
This problem is really about Big Government cutting back and vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, showing the faults of an old tax system, the fuel tax. The state government are attacking the people that are easy to attack, Hybrid and EV drivers. Who will defend those people? Yuck! They are like smokers and drinkers, easy targets.

 

Here in VA they just changed how the gas tax is collected. They did away with the Gas tax. & added it to the state sales tax. So now everyone pays for the roads. I do not understand all of it yet.

 

It was stated last week that we had plenty of money for roads. It is the Government Regulations that add to the cost.

 

Yes, because guardrails and sign posts that cause more injuries and death are just dandy.

Was it mentioned what these regulations were? For the most part, construction regulations are to increase safety and decrease failure rates. Environmental and wildlife impact surveys might be considered onerous by some, but not doing them has lead to problems down the road in the past.

 

No the details were not discussed. I remember when CA got hit by the last large earth quake...the government got out of the way and the roads were rebuilt in record time and at half the normal cost.

SCH-I535 ? 2

 

JG what region of Virginia are you living in? The new transportation bill basically separates the state into North VA and rest-of-state, and then says North Virginia should pay most of the road taxes. Also Hampton Roads area pays more.

Here in my town, the grass on the medians strips is 5-ft tall as VDOT has apparently abandoned north Virginia. This tall grass non-sense started about 5-years ago. Believe the new transportation bill forms a Northern VA Transportation Authority and we will start taking care of our own roads.

Actually we still have gaso tax at 3.5% wholesale (only Alaska is lower) but this assumes Congress passes the internet sales tax. If Congress delays past 2015 we revert back to current levels of gaso tax. Several states (VA, MD) are ear-marking the new internet sales tax for roads (assuming it passes Congress).

 

This thread is a classic case of "What is fair (to me) is what does not gore my ox." Some large, pre-emptive increase in motor fuel taxes is not likely to happen, and for several reasons, none of which are either necessarily "fair," nor do they bear discussion here (and I think everyone contributing to this thread knows that).
There are three hundred million people in this country, and a lot of them own cars, and drive them. Some, a lot. It's been tentative, so far, but there appears to be a dawning realization that this just may not be sustainable. So far, the increases in the price of motor fuel just haven't had that dramatic an impact on this type of consumption, the resources involved, or the environmental impacts. It will happen, just not yet.

Another digression follows, for which I am famous. If you're not interested, quit reading here.

Consider Europe, by contrast. Car sales are basically dead everywhere but in the UK, and this has been going on for a while......but your average European has options. We have traveled in Europe, and in most of the places we've stayed (but not all...southern Bavaria and Normandy come to mind) efficient and rapid public transport is available to go just about anywhere. If we lived in one of these places, we could just decide to park the car a good bit of the time and make use of train, bus, metro, etc. This can only be viewed with horror and alarm in the United States, of course, where the Eleventh Commandment is "Thou shalt not inconvenience the Great American Middle Class."
On a more practical level public transportation is just horrible about anywhere in the U.S. outside of the major metropolitan areas and "corridors" where it can be made to pay for itself. There are cities the size of Houston (a good example being.....Houston) that have public transport that's a joke. There are exceptions; the university town we live hard by (Champaign-Urbana, IL) has a mass transit district that won the national small-city award (and deservedly so) often enough that people got tired of hearing about it. So....it CAN be done. There are solutions that don't involve a single person driving everywhere and all the time in an automobile. But, IMHO, it's not going to come about in this country soon, or without many alarums and excursions.

 

Good information.

SCH-I535 ? 2

 

I don't have a problem with per-mile road pricing. I have a problem with the level at which they want to set it. Price them as efficient gasoline car, which essentially means tax/Prius mpg. But, owners should be credited with any sales tax paid on the excess vehicle price, however they want to calculate that. PHEVs aee a problem, but they have data on EV use that could allow the owner to claim a credit for fuel consumed.

I thoroughly dislike John's (and AAA's) idea of flat rate pricing and I shall until a civil engineer can tell me that vehicle weight isn't a factor in the cost. Certainly there's an element of traffic volume and weathering that should be shared, but unless the weight factors are insignificant the user should pay according to their "road consumption" and that includes eliminating any current cross-subsidy on road freight. I don't buy the argument about emergency services: the emergency services will pay their costs and people will pay for that cost in general taxation.

Havig said all that, once you shift to a fair, more accurate system of road pricing, then you can directly apply a system of credits for low pollution vehicles, and a system of incentives for low consumption.

I just don't feel that there's really any hurry to do this in most states, given the additional sales tax revenue and indirect economic benefits from lower pollution and gasoline use.

 

No it is a classic case of what is good for the US vs. what is good for special interests such fossil fuel producers, military contractors, real estate developers and shoddy building contractors.

Cutting oil use is No. 1 national security priority from every standpoint, military, economic and environmental. Hybrids do that. Gas/oil tax does that.

Taxing fuel efficient cars does not do it and works AGAINST US national interest.

The issue in a nutshell.

 

That is not what the people who fund politics ((...oil...)) think!

 

Glad you cleared that up. I think the only groups you forgot to put on your list were child molesters and people who kick little chickens in the creek (with apologies to the late George Gobel).

 

A Tax By Mile plan is suicide for the auto industry and businesses. People just won't move, even less than what they do now. I see people just tied to their houses, that they have put far too much of their resources into, and work, work, working because they are afraid to take a real vacation. And now you want to punish people for being mobile? You want to give the bloated tax industry more tasks to weigh down Americans? Tax if you must at yearly registration, people will understand a flat tax with no loop holes, because vehicles are meant to be driven.

 

The problem with a tax by mile is it doesn't tax the behavior we are trying to reduce and which costs us $1T a year in import taxes, military spending and pollution. Someone driving a hybrid or EV does not contribute to those costs. They should not only not be taxed by given tax credits to reward good behavior.

Tax on gasoline's main goal is to reduce oil use and to pay the $1T a year in costs and to reduce those costs by reducing oil use.