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White House floats driving tax
Traffic stacks up on the west- and east-bound lanes of the 210 Foothill Freeway near Los Angeles, Calif.
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Jeremy Hobson: Well to the White House now which is pushing back against a leaked report involving a new driving tax. The Department of Transportation is reportedly looking into the idea of taxing drivers based on how many miles they drive, and using the revenue to maintain roads and highways.
Marketplace's Eve Troeh reports.
Eve Troeh: American highways need major repairs, and the flat, per-gallon gas tax won't cover it -- especially as people drive more fuel-efficient cars.
UCLA transportation professor Brian Taylor says in the past, we'd raise the tax.
Brian Taylor: The first response it, 'well that's a terrible idea -- I don't like that, what else do you have?'
Taylor says today it's feasible to charge people based on how much they drive.
Taylor: We now have the ability with GPS, with electronic systems that can track vehicles, to have drivers pay directly for how much they use the roadways.
But a tax on mileage could hit commercial trucking particularly hard, says Bruce Belzowski at the University of Michigan Transportation Institute. And we might all pay for that.
Bruce Belzowski: Because the added cost that you're charging these, the companies, many times gets transferred to the consumer in terms of the cost of products.
He says trucking companies invested heavily to meet federal fuel efficiency standards. Slapping them with a driving tax on top of that wouldn't be fair.
I'm Eve Troeh for Marketplace.
This is nuts. They haven't even kept the gas tax up with inflation, no wonder it isn't enough. How can they be serious about breaking our addiction to fossil fuels when they're effectively subsidizing cost of driving cars. They're using general taxes make up the difference to pay for roads because they're too spineless to index the gas tax to inflation.
They should ditch the CAFE standards to just make the gas tax appropriate to pay all road transportaiton related costs e.g. CHP, DMV, etc). People will naturally gravitate to more fuel efficient vehicles and life choices, which is ultimately what we want.
For years, Congress has raided the gas tax coffers for pet projects. If we could cut misuse of existing gas tax revenues, there would be plenty to support our infrastructure. This is but another attempt by the socialist Administration to enforce their social engineering plans on all of us - make gasoline unaffordable by any means necessary so more of us must live closer to city centers, be more dependent on public transportation, and become wards of the state.
Fuel taxes are presently about $115 billion per year and except for last year have been increasing steadily as fuel use increases. In January 2011, total Fed plus local motor gasoline taxes averaged 48.1 cents per gallon and diesel fuel taxes averaged 53.1 cents per gallon (includes federal excise tax of 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline, and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel).
How easy it is for a commenter to say goods sent by truck will become a bit more expensive. Those goods include FOOD. Those at the poor end of the financial spectrum will find their food stamps buying less and less.
The general assumption in Idaho is that the feds will shoot themselves in the foot and everyone in the vicinity too. So people are very busy establishing home gardens, canning and setting up backyard chickens.
Two comments: firstly, taxation on a mileage basis would require installing an electronic system at a cost of (no doubt) at least $500 in the 250 million light vehicles (nearly half of them over ten years old) which are on the road. That's an over $100 billion windfall for some lucky companies which contribute enough to the right politicians.
Secondly, why do light vehicles have to contribute any more than they do? A heavy truck does more than 10,000 times the damage to roads than a light vehicle, and only uses about four times as much fuel. Seems to me that a mileage tax on heavy vehicles only is exactly what we need, even if it does push up prices of goods transported over roads. That would save fuel by encouraging local production and transport by rail or barge rather than truck.
This 'crocodile tears' story overlooks the *fact* that the federal gasoline tax (which, via liberal matching ratios, funds virtually all highway spending in the USA) HAS NOT BEEN INCREASED SINCE 1993, THE FIRST YEAR OF BILL CLINTON'S PRESIDENCY (remember him?).
And that was a whopping 4.3 cents per gallon!! Whooohooo....
Since then, not only has a more fuel-efficient vehicle fleet trimmed the annual growth in the Highway Trust Fund's revenues, but so too has inflation eaten into its purchasing power.
(I might additionally note here that gold-plated but low-return urban transit and Congressionally- earmarked "bridge to nowhere" projects have eaten into the muscle of the federal Highway Trust Fund, but serve as distractions to the undeniable and principal reason the fund is running out of money.)
Any proposal to adopt a per-mile charge to make up for prolonged Congressional inaction is simply unnecessary but also worrisome in its implications.
A flat per gallon tax is, for the most part and for everyone, the VERY SAME as a per mile charge for the use of our highways.
The bigger question is not *how* to collect the money, but whether we're collecting enough money to maintain and expand the system.
With a per mile fee, we're tossing out the baby with the bathwater -- and allowing Big Brother the ability to constantly monitor our comings and goings.
