US Contemplating 'Vehicle Miles Traveled' Tax 1306
dawgs72 writes "This week the Congressional Budget Office released a report saying that taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues, and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance. The proposed tax would be enforced through the use of electronic metering devices installed on all vehicles. The mileage tax is being considered instead of an increase in the gas tax in order to tax hybrids, EVs, and conventional automobiles equally."
Cars already have this device installed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All this effort, just to avoid the real problem (Score:3, Informative)
Raising taxes from historically low, unsustainable levels? Preposterous!
Re:Sounds like a headache (Score:5, Informative)
You can't. It's a size issue. this idea of everyone living in a city is absurd.
Sure you can - It just takes city planners with vision. Look at these pictures from my city (Vancouver, Canada). I have lots of friends raising families in the city, with parks, schools, supermarkets nearby and all walkable.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2734/4112965898_7112701b00.jpg [flickr.com]
http://static-p4.fotolia.com/jpg/00/08/70/45/400_F_8704550_q9V0W99I76eCkun4RbXmAi8sjTieGEix.jpg [fotolia.com]
The buildings you see in those pictures are all residential.
Re:Non starter (Score:4, Informative)
Anything that monitors my car will not sit well with me.
Oh wait, or anyone at all.
Unless you have a car that was built pre-OBD2 (older than 1996) your car already has this in place. PID 31 [wikipedia.org] records how many miles your car has traveled since it was last reset.
Re:Sounds like a headache (Score:5, Informative)
> Because my "sprawling" 1280 sq ft. home in the suburbs (where I ride the bus 20 miles each way) costs me $723/month whereas rent would be over $1000/month and a mortgage would be well in excess of $1000/month in the city?
Where is this? Idaho?
Here in New York rent or mortgage is certainly over $3,000/mo.
Re:Sounds like a headache (Score:5, Informative)
Are you fucking kidding me?
Perhaps if your friends are super rich they can afford to live in vancouver city proper. MOST people with kids live in the suburbs, unless they live in their parents old house or some other stroke of luck. There was even an article on it in the tyee recently: Vancouvers Downtown Chases out kids [thetyee.ca]
Not to mention the fact that EVERYONE drives in the lower mainland.. EVERYONE.. Taking the transit is simply not an option as its between 3.75 to 5.00 each way from any suburb. Which is MORE than it costs for gasoline on the same trip, even with gas being 1.31/L currently. Source [translink.ca]
Vancouver is HORRIBLY designed. We have very poor density compared to many other urban centres, with sprawling "vancouver special" houses which are built wide, not tall due to regulations. You have these choke points of bridges which clog up and waste tonnes of time every day. Even in my 7km commute to downtown (read BARELY in the suburbs), generally takes an 30-45 minutes in rush hour. And thats using plenty of shortcuts.
Now these condos you mentioned, from your image it looks to be olympic village. Want to know what it costs to live there? Go take a look: Olympic Village Pricing [thevillage...ecreek.com]. You will see that it costs 500k -1M for a 2 bedroom 800sqft apartment in your "city planners with vision" utopia. How the fuck is that affordable for a family???
Sure if you think its a good idea to raise a family in an 800sqft shoebox with only concord pacifics Ãvisionà of "shared green space" (2 acres for like 10k people to relax in) Source [vancouversun.com]. But honestly, i think you are rich, terribly deluded, dont have kids over 4 years old, or simply misinformed.
The bottom line is that you are wrong to use vancouver as a good model of anything sustainable or affordable. Vancouver, where you cant get a 1200sqft house for under 850k. Vancouver, where there is a whole site making fun of the fact that you cant tell million dollar houses from crack house [crackshackormansion.com].
Vancouver has a LONG way to go before it is hospitable to families or even pedestrians! When was the last time you walked to surrey from downtown? To burnaby? To richmond?
Re:Sounds like a headache (Score:3, Informative)
But that's because there's a supply-demand issue. Everyone wants to live in the city, but there is limited housing.
Over here in Germany, the number of multi-family housing (apartment blocks) are tremendous, and all over the place in the cities. Most every shop, store, building, has tons of residential housing (varying from 1, 2, 3 or 4 bdrs) on top. And because there is so much available, it's really cheap to be living in dense housing in the city, close to the trains, and the parks, and the shops (which are sometimes just downstairs). My rent is 250€/mo here, much much cheaper than renting out in the suburbs.
Re:The Real Real problem (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Extremely insightful.
And the reason trucks damage roads is the way they are taxed. Trucks are taxed per axle, thus by loading up each axle to the weight limit they pay the least tax. But high axle loads in trucks is the cause of the majority of road wear. If instead trucks were taxed based on axle weight, they would have more axles to carry the same load and significantly reduce road wear. We should turn all those 18 wheelers in to 56 wheelers, and roads would last a lot longer.
The axle load versus wear effect has been well known for at least a quarter of a century. We could fix it by making a two line change in the tax code, thus realigning the incentives. Why doesn't this happen? Because all the truckers have to replace a lot of expensive infrastructure. So the way to make this happen is to phase it in -- all new trailers pay the tax the new way, all old trailers can pay the old tax for 10 years if they were manufactured before a certain date. Ten years is a long time? *pffft*, if we had done this when the problem was first documented we would have been converted over more than a decade ago.
Re:All this effort, just to avoid the real problem (Score:2, Informative)
Wow. Just...wow.
To all the folks crying to cut government worker pay and pensions, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
First, which government? Most of you are making no distinction between federal, state, local, and any other other sort of government. You should. There's a great deal of difference.
In a nutshell, most people seem to think feds are the problem. They're not.
Federal government workers are paid, on the low end, slightly more than their private sector counterparts. Or, put another way, because we believe our government should be a little more fair in the way it treats people (as contrasted with, say, your typical mega-corp robber baron), that government pays clerical folks almost enough to get by, putting them a bit ahead of the normal private sector slave wage level. However, since there are far more low-end employees than high-level ones, their slightly more fair salary makes it look like average federal wages are high. That's not the case. If you have a decent education or special skills or you are a high-level manager, working for the fed means being woefully underpaid. There is, essentially, no federal equivalent of the private-sector executive who makes a million bucks a year.
So if you want to cut federal wages, what you're really asking is that the vast majority of federal workers on the low end of the wage scale be pushed down even further, often past the poverty line. That's not progress; that's volunteering the other guy to be exploited and, ultimately, it doesn't help.
When it comes to the folks demanding a reduction in federal pensions, I can only ask "Where have you been for the last 25 years?" The old Civil Service Retirement System, which is what you're thinking of when you think of some sort of traditional, gold-plated pension plan, ceased to take in new members over a quarter of a century ago. The last people in that plan are retiring now.
Everyone who's hired on since the mid 1980s is a part of the Federal Employees Retirement System, which is a perfectly reasonable, slightly-better-than-private-sector retirement plan with three components: a tiny pension, a Thrift Savings Plan (govt-worker version of a 401k), and Social Security.
CSRS retirees are dying off and FERS employees aren't causing a problem.
Is there anyone out there who actually thinks *federal* workers should have their pay or pensions cut? I'd love to hear why.