Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

The author isn't suggesting that gas taxes should vary with income. His point is that they're a flat tax and flat taxes are regressive.

I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context.

Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Manhattan or they'd rather take commuter rail than sit in traffic. To the extent the latter take ubers or similar such services already pay congestion charges and there isn't too much fuss (except from the drives who don't have much political muscle).

The bulk of car commuters into Manhattan are instead those with de jure or de facto free parking. That's largely government workers (e.g. teachers, cops, firefighters) and members of the trades (i.e. construction workers).

For those with de jure free parking congestion pricing isn't a big deal, whatever authority is setting aside parking will either pay the congestion charge or get it waived. It's the beneficiaries of police and traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations that are up in arms about congestion charges. Because a congestion charge is likely to be enforced by an automated mechanism which, unlike parking control, will not engage in public corruption on their behalf. And these groups, unlike the uber drivers, do have a great deal of political muscle.

+At least the ordinary rich, hecto-millionaires and billionaires might be a different story

I "love" those kind of articles, though this one is a bit different.

But it boils down to "let's make car owners pay a lot of money - (and this article) except if they're poor, then they can't afford being fleeced for wanting to drive" (really Capt. Obvious? so maybe fleecing drivers is not the way to go)

There's a balance between preferring other types of transportation and hating cars. Not to mention this article is US centric and seems to ignore how it's done elsewhere.

"Not pricing roads, which results in slower bus speeds. " there's an answer for that: bus lanes. Exists in several countries.

"Poor people pay more for parking than the rich" Really? (Oh by the way, they don't because of convenience and you might prefer the parking that's further and doesn't have a cover for your old car while the rich might favour the valet parking one next to their office)

I don't think there's much secret to it. Gas taxes are, in the end, a carbon tax. Use more gas pay more for it.

Exactly. Once we remove health insurance from employment, I think everyone will be a lot happier. One of the biggest stressors in changing jobs is health insurance. If employees didn't have to worry about that, choosing a new job would be less of a problem (or quitting altogether to work on a business idea).

Once the majority of people are buying their own health insurance, the market for doing so will improve, and we could see private alternatives to healthcare.gov, as well as more brokers willing to take that on.

If I could change one thing about history, it would be wage and price controls during WW2 that got us into the situation of employers offering health insurance, and if I could change anything now, it would be eliminating that. I ran the math, and _most_ of our employees would've been better off buying from the market (e.g. through the subsidies they don't qualify for because our company offers insurance). I presented this to my boss, and he rejected it on the grounds that people expect the company to provide it.

We need to kill that culture before we can seriously consider changing health insurance/care again.

"Nobody drives a car in Manhattan cause traffic is just terrible!"