Punitive taxes for hybrid owners.

Hummers & Alaskan golf carts... they barely do anything to the roads. They aren't the real problem.

It's the truly heavy stuff- loaded dump-bed trucks, garbage trucks, cement mixers, tractor-trailers, combination tankers etc.

Relevant link.

 

Exactly why it's silly to single out one kind of vehicle, especially one that really makes little to no difference. In OP's state there are very few hybrids on the road, so what gives?

 

appeasement of voting base. we're pretty blue around here, and yet, a hybrid tax would make a lot of voters happy.

 

I'm in favor of doing away with all fuel taxes and instead going with the mileage surcharge on the annual registration or taxes provided the surcharge is tiered based on the weight of the vehicle. The lighter the vehicle, the less the surcharge. Consider out of state vehicles coming into your state a cost your state pays for encouraging and accepting tourism and interstate commerce. Then it doesn't matter if how the vehicle's motor is propelled.

 

The trouble is fuel tax is the only efficient tax somewhere over 99% gets into government coffers automatically.
It’s a modern success. (One of very few)

The local Wisconsin DMV fee system on the other hand wastes 55% and only 45% makes it into the coffers. The state biannual emissions program looses millions a year (and you gotta pay for the privilege)

So to do what you say (pay fees) you would need to pay twice as much tax to offset the current gas tax.

Then you also have folks like my uncle who just stop paying for license, registration and insurance for a decade or two because it’s too expensive and his story is quite common in rural areas.
Blood out of a turnip scenario if he was caught.
Heck I know folks that just drive ATVs and snowmobiles up north on road and don’t drive a car at all, police seem to not care.

Gas tax at least is mostly unavoidable except for business that can mostly write it off as an expense or buy tax exempt and get an on road waiver like the sand haulers up north.

 

There have been about 10 million threads talking about this around here lately ( OK..I'm exaggerating just a bit ). Must be a hot topic!

My main beef, as I've stated many times, is that gasoline hybrids are gasoline-only vehicles. So what if they have an internal battery...the *only* power source is gasoline. There are also many ICE-only ( i.e. 'regular' ) vehicles that can achieve higher mileage than some gasoline hybrid vehicles. Therefore, it makes absolutely no sense that gasoline hybrids should be penalized...does it?

Now..the argument can be made that full electric vehicles 'could' be charged an additional tax. In fact, to some it even makes sense. However, that leaves plugin hybrids in somewhat of a gray area.

Unfortunately, due to politics or stupidity ( or both ), politicians rarely make any distinction whatsoever between the three types of vehicles that are considered for the penalty. And do realize that gasoline hybrids are more expensive to purchase than their ICE-only counterparts.

I'm not sure what the answer is ( possibly a completely different tax system )...but clearly gasoline hybrids should NOT be subject to any penalty. And if they are, high mileage ICE vehicles should also be subject to it.

 

That would be interesting. *However*, those companies would lobby till the cows come home. Politically, I'm not sure it is a winnable position. Unfortunate but true.

In my opinion, in a state like mine (MN), the biggest contributor *by far* to road degradation is mother nature. The winters here take a horrible toll on roads. It always amazes me how good the roads are in Florida, etc....when we travel there.

Too bad we can't tax mother nature! Although I'm sure the politicians have tried.

 

HWY 51 (before the i39 abomination existed) made it about 30 years without repaving and was still in fair shape before they started tearing it out.

After conversion to cement it seems like the road is crap every other year and has annual segments repaved up and down it’s length.

HWY I 39 by Wausau seemed to be under construction for about 15 years, not sure what that was about, it was only 5 miles long.

There are 40 year old roads (never touched) in good condition near II, (and different stretches of the same road paved at the same time almost disintegrated by the trees) not sure what the secret was to the part that is smooth and the other part that is almost turned to gravel.

 

Well there's bad news to be had. If we forced the trucking companies to use more smaller trucks, they'd have to hire a lot more drivers and make a bunch more runs to get the same stuff delivered. Your grocery bill would go up a LOT. As for shopping around? All of these stores are stocked with goods trucked from the same distribution centers, so the only things that wouldn't go up much are whatever is actually grown/raised/processed in your zipcode already. So if you drove everywhere you'd eventually find everything for cheap, but 4,000 miles a week to do the grocery list isn't an option for most people.

 

I think we can all agree..there are no easy answers here.

 

+1

"Writing it off as an expense" doesn't avoid the gas tax at all, it simply provides a discount equal to the income tax rate.

But because business income taxes are meant to tax only profits, not gross receipts, it only makes sense that all the legitimate costs of running the business, the money that can't go into the owner's pocket as income, be written off or deducted. Otherwise, we'd run into the absurd situation of profitless, money-loosing (i.e. no income) businesses still having to pay large 'income' tax bills.

IOW, without writeoffs, it isn't an income tax, it is a gross receipts or revenue tax.

 

There is no easy solution but the inefficiency of your state's DMV is something that should be addressed instead of dismissing the entire idea just because your DMV is poor what they do. In today's world it SHOULD be no problem for anyone collecting funds designated for a specific purpose to electronically roll over those funds to the desired location by EFT with virtually no overhead. Voters should be demanding better efficiency and rolling heads if the powers that be don't improve efficiency.

 

Even credit and debit card processing systems, handling individual small transactions, have much greater overhead than the current gas tax processed on large bulk transfers.

The bridge and HOT-lane tolling systems around here, with the giant overhead RFID/photo sensors and a lot of (privately contracted) humans to review the harder photos of missed auto-reads, have vastly higher overheads than those common credit/debit transactions.

While they (and weather) are the main causes of damage, they are not the cause of needing to expand road capacity and add more lanes. If it were just trucks on the roads, all the Interstate Highways could be just a single lane in each direction. It is those very many light cars that create the need to expand highways to many lanes. So cars still need to pay for that.

I.e. turn these public roads into private toll roads. That'll go over well with the public. Not!

 

Many older stores in this area including where I work have a train dock on site.

If Semi shipping were expensive enough we might start using it again.

I haven’t seen stuff shipped in or out by train in at least 8 years, finance says train costs too much sending our 40,000lb+ “Products “ to the customer who also has a dock, never could figure out how that could be.

 

I couldn't know for sure, but I'm happy to speculate that a bunch of trucking companies are willing to compete with each other while the one railroad in town just posts prices.

This isn't an especially good thing. The trucking companies I've dealt with are competing too hard. This comes at the expense of labor, so we've seen a big increase in less-professional drivers. Meanwhile the trains aren't getting used very much, even for the heavy-hauls they can do best.

 

I noticed in one of the threads above an individual was quoting peoples comments and then interpreting them in a completely different light than they were meant. When I mentioned an option of privatizing some road maintenance and construction it had nothing to do with instituting toll roads as an individual implied. In the area we live toll roads are operated and instituted by only one entity it starts with a G and ends with a t and has overnmen between them. After taxing people to death the government builds a bridge or road and then taxes people again to use it.
Instead of giving all the public road funds to Government transportation departments have private road repair and road design crews compete for it. This is just one idea to help this situation as it really all comes down to economics and proper management of funds. I believe the private sector does a much better job of this.
Looking to the government to fix this is a fools folly. Our country is currently running trillions of dollars in deficits for our government with some current politicians actually calling for free college tuition and free medical care for all. The solutions will come from the private sector and individuals like ourselves discussing different solutions - certainly not from the government.

 

isn't most road construction maintenance already done by private companies bidding for the work? save for local potholes

 

If you are referring to me, then I must go with Bisco's response. In my region, all construction and most major maintenance is already contracted out to private industry, and always has been. Government workers do only minor maintenance. Further privatization of this work would seem to require the private entities cutting out the government middleman, thus needing to also collect funding directly from users or consumers. I.e. tolling.

If you mean pushing the government out of some of the design work business too? You might have a point there.

 

It is around here by Unionized companies who make mint....

 

... or get mint by federal labor law covering certain types of contracts.