More Big Brother horseshit designed to raise taxes

[WTF]

Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn

When did the government of free men and women go into the business of regulating behavior? If you allow that action then how long will we be free? That seems to be the progressive idea. We are all too stupid to run our own lives so they (the experts) have to decided how much we drive, what we eat and how much, where we can live and how long we can live if we get sick,

Don't forget regulating "When life begins"....oh wait, you love that one.

How about ''two people getting married''....oh wait you love to regulate that too.

Flag burning....another one of your favorite behavior to regulate.

Damn JD, your world seems no more free to me than yours does to mine...

[gnadfly]

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Replace it with general revenue. Getting carbon spewing cars off the road is a feature, not a bug. Speeding the transition is part of the appeal of higher gas taxes.

Carbon spewing cars are going to make up most of the traffic long after you are gone TTH. And I don't mean to France.

[BJerk]

Originally Posted by ExNYer

That's true in the cities. But that's also true in rural and suburban areas.

The groceries in Tom Thumb in Plano or Allen also reflect the freight cost of the truck that brought them to the store.

But people in the suburbs and rural areas will also be hit with a higher share of the mileages taxes on TOP of the built-in freight costs.

But the city dwellers benefit from the driving done by suburbanites also.

It isn't possible or affordable for everyone to live in the city. Much (most?) of the work force in, for example, New York lives outside of Manhattan. They take mass transit into the city to work and they keep the city running. But when they commute home, they need cars to support their own lives.

They have more miles of road and less people to pay for them. Why should they bear the lion's share of the road tax burden (through a mileage tax) when the city dwellers benefit just as much from the roads in the outlying areas?

Like I said above, roads are like educations. Everybody benefits from them. Everybody should pay equally for them.

Everyone benefits, but not everyone benefits equally. So, the disproportionate impact is accounted for via the usage fee by proxy, the fuel tax.

Does everyone fairly benefit from education? Some people get scholarships, while others don't. The main beneficiaries of education are those that went to a good college and got a worthwhile degree. In some ways, an over educated society with many college graduates who cannot get jobs related to their education just wasted 4 or 5 productive years they could have been doing something useful, like advocating for union membership or community organizing, building roads, picking up garbage, fixing things. Society pays when educated people waste an education.

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by Bert Jones

Everyone benefits, but not everyone benefits equally. So, the disproportionate impact is accounted for via the usage fee by proxy, the fuel tax.

Does everyone fairly benefit from education? Some people get scholarships, while others don't. The main beneficiaries of education are those that went to a good college and got a worthwhile degree. In some ways, an over educated society with many college graduates who cannot get jobs related to their education just wasted 4 or 5 productive years they could have been doing something useful, like advocating for union membership or community organizing, building roads, picking up garbage, fixing things. Society pays when educated people waste an education.

Your own example about education refutes what you said about fuel taxes.

You're right. Not everyone benefits the same from education, but we all pay the same education taxes, right?

So why should paying for roads be any different?

Cities can't exist without the suburbs and exurbs around them. That's where much of the work force comes from. If gas taxes/mileage taxes are lopsidedly expensive, people won't be able to afford to live in the suburbs and commute. But the only reason a lot of them were living in the suburbs to begin with was that they couldn't afford the city in the first place.

So if a lot of them try to move back to the city, how is the city going to house them? Will the city pay for public housing for all those people? How high will house and apartment prices go?

How expensive will that be compared to paying for roads so they don't have to live in the city?

I really don't think there is much disparity in benefit derive from roads between city dwellers and commuters from suburbs. Mostly because it is so difficult to quantify the benefit the city gets from its suburbs and exurbs.

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Replace it with general revenue. Getting carbon spewing cars off the road is a feature, not a bug. Speeding the transition is part of the appeal of higher gas taxes.

Then we agree. I have been advocating using general revenue to pay for roads.

I think a mileage tax is unfair. Everyone benefits from roads, even those who don't drive. And we don't need the government tracking us.

[BJerk]

Originally Posted by ExNYer

Your own example about education refutes what you said about fuel taxes.

You're right. Not everyone benefits the same from education, but we all pay the same education taxes, right?

So why should paying for roads be any different?

Cities can't exist without the suburbs and exurbs around them. That's where much of the work force comes from. If gas taxes/mileage taxes are lopsidedly expensive, people won't be able to afford to live in the suburbs and commute. But the only reason a lot of them were living in the suburbs to begin with was that they couldn't afford the city in the first place.

So if a lot of them try to move back to the city, how is the city going to house them? Will the city pay for public housing for all those people? How high will house and apartment prices go?

How expensive will that be compared to paying for roads so they don't have to live in the city?

I really don't think there is much disparity in benefit derive from roads between city dwellers and commuters from suburbs. Mostly because it is so difficult to quantify the benefit the city gets from its suburbs and exurbs.

If you want to use the education taxes example, I would go back to the 7 series and S class example where road taxes are based upon car value. A guy living in a million dollar mansion doesn't pay as much in taxes as the average person in a 200,000 dollar house - he pays 5 times as much. It is hard to pay for roads out of general revenue because too many companies (like GE) cheat the government out of taxes they owe. The government can track you in your car, already. There is never a way to tax that keeps everyone happy. Usage taxes seem most fair to those who don't use them, just like a graduated income tax seems fair to those 47% who don't pay them. They will get to use the roads for free when paid for out of general revenue.

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by Bert Jones

If you want to use the education taxes example, I would go back to the 7 series and S class example where road taxes are based upon car value. A guy living in a million dollar mansion doesn't pay as much in taxes as the average person in a 200,000 dollar house - he pays 5 times as much. It is hard to pay for roads out of general revenue because too many companies (like GE) cheat the government out of taxes they owe. The government can track you in your car, already. There is never a way to tax that keeps everyone happy. Usage taxes seem most fair to those who don't use them, just like a graduated income tax seems fair to those 47% who don't pay them. They will get to use the roads for free when paid for out of general revenue.

But what happens when the higher income people stop driving the expensive cars and go back to mid-priced cars?

High income earners may still buy a high priced house despite higher school taxes, but that is because the house appreciates in value.

It is a lot easier for them to give up a Mercedes, since that goes DOWN in value anyway. So why put up with being gouged on taxes?

[BJerk]

Originally Posted by ExNYer

But what happens when the higher income people stop driving the expensive cars and go back to mid-priced cars?

High income earners may still buy a high priced house despite higher school taxes, but that is because the house appreciates in value.

It is a lot easier for them to give up a Mercedes, since that goes DOWN in value anyway. So why put up with being gouged on taxes?

If they give up the expensive cars, the tax rates for everyone will have to be raised to compensate. It is still an overpriced status symbol, so many will still want to drive them. Everyone who pays taxes probably thinks they are getting gouged, even GE, with its massive tax avoidance division. Taxes are needed to keep all the different government entities working, and they need to be spread around so everyone pays something.

[WTF]

ExNYer...just take a look at how Europe gets around. By rail. We here in this country did so too until Ike went on this massive road building spree.

[Texas Contrarian]

Officials in the state of Oregon have been talking about a mileage-based tax for some time. Illinois and Nevada have also planned "experimental" programs.

But I think it's a bad idea for a number of reasons. First of all, every car would be required to have some sort of little GPS gizmo or measuring device, which would obviously have to be paid for by someone. And notwithstanding whether the technology design can reasonably be expected to assuage privacy concerns, a lot of people are going to be troubled by the existence of any stored data. Women worried about deranged, nutcase stalkers, for instance.

In the Oregon discussion of this matter, someone raised the concern that since the idea was to finance State of Oregon roads and highways, what about residents who travel out of state? Should Oregon be allowed to tax those miles? The answer proponents gave was, "We have the ability to track and separate non-Oregon miles." The obvious rejoinder is, "Fine. But doesn't that mean you also have the ability to track all sorts of other things people might not want to have sitting in some database somewhere?"

Politicians are reticent to talk about doing it for obvious reasons, but raising the gasoline tax would be far less damaging, and incomparably simpler. (Since it's already in existence.) If that, over time, disincentivizes fuel consumption to the extent that revenues eventually fall, so what? I see that as an unambiguously good thing. As has been noted earlier, roads and highways can be financed with general revenue, like most other things. The very existence of highway "trust funds" amounts to just an unnecessary extra layer of government complexity.

Originally Posted by Bert Jones

Personally, I think that cars should be taxed every year on value, like real estate. You drive a fancy 7 series or S class, you pay the price.

Ad valorem taxation of vehicle market value would be a messy, clumsy process and would simply add more bloat to tax appraisal and collection entities. Vehicles obviously decline in market value very rapidly. Do you think we should hire a bunch of new clerks to sit around confirming the latest year's Blue Book value for every vehicle in the country? (Although I suppose that unabashed fans of big government would note that the idea would be a "jobs program!") Also, don't forget that buyers of luxury cars already pay a higher tax on expensive cars once (the sales tax).

Nobody likes paying more taxes. But there are relatively transparent, less bad forms of taxation, and clumsy, crude, annoying methods that produce undesirable side effects and large deadweight losses -- and in some cases backfire (as was the case with the short-lived "luxury tax" of 1990).

It seems obvious that it's preferable to avoid the latter.

[nevergaveitathought]

why tax cars based on value? is that some kind of retribution against success?

we should applaud success and even if it was all inherited the purchase of expensive items benefits the working man from stem to stern

[WTF]

Originally Posted by nevergaveitathought

we should applaud success and even if it was all inherited

'' inherited success '' is an oxymoron, moron.




Someone explain it to our resident simpleton.

[TexTushHog]

Taxing cars on value used to be a rough proxy for carbon consumption or weight. But why tax a Tesla S heavily? It doesn't burn much carbon. That would be foolish in the extreme. Yes, there are relatively few of them now, although I have colleges who have them, but you want folks to buy more of them, not fewer

Originally Posted by gnadfly

Carbon spewing cars are going to make up most of the traffic long after you are gone TTH. And I don't mean to France.

Then all the more reason to make them pay for the catastrophic damage that they're doing. And if $3/gal isn't enough, you can always raise it. At some price -- $5, $7, $10/gal -- they'll get busy and find a safe alternative.

Originally Posted by ExNYer

Then we agree. I have been advocating using general revenue to pay for roads.

I think a mileage tax is unfair. Everyone benefits from roads, even those who don't drive. And we don't need the government tracking us.

I think that as a general rule of thumb, almost everything ought to be paid out of general revenue. It is a rare circumstance where dedicated revenues are warranted. One is a Pigouvian tax to internalize external costs. And that partially exists in driving, at least to the extent that it's fueled by carbon based fuels. So that's why I'm not terribly averse to taxes on carbon based fuels. But you're still going to need some substantial component of general revenue.

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by WTF

ExNYer...just take a look at how Europe gets around. By rail. We here in this country did so too until Ike went on this massive road building spree.

We'll never have that rail system, unless we want to start over.

We build our system around freight from the start. They built theirs more heavily around passenger travel. We had to cover a vast continent with less people in it. They had more population density in a smaller area. So the two systems evolved differently.

People won't get out of planes unless we have high speed rail that can go city to city in comparable times.

Any high speed rail we want to build will have to contend with freight trains that will cause inevitable slow downs unless you build all new tracks and segregate the two types of traffic.

And local commuter trains are even worse. There are maybe a half dozen cities with the necessary density and downtown business locations to support subways and commuter trains. NY, Boston, SF, Chicago, and a couple of others.

Dallas is more typical. While you have some downtown buildings full of banks, insurance companies, and law firms, you have other buildings far from downtown that have the same types of businesses. And forget about blue-collar businesses and factories. They are spread far and wide.

The DART rail system had to be built cheap, so they built it above ground right in the middle of downtown. It's a glorified trolley in the downtown area.

Buses work better in cities like Dallas. But it still isn't every efficient.