Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and so what makes the most sense is to make the tax increase with the 4th power of vehicle weight multiplied by the miles they travel. This way there are no perverse incentives. Everyone pays their fair share according to how much damage they cause.
I love pushing "Tire Taxes". We all know that tires will emit rubber particles down to the point where the tire tred is 2/32th of an inch (from ~8/32ths of a fresh tire). So just... tax the tires based on the ~6/32ths of an inch outer-diameter of the tire that turns into microplastic dust. Calculate the microplastic dust weight of the outer diameter + weight of tires and bam. You have a 1-to-1 correlation of tax to e…
If I were a tire manufacturer I'd love this because I would:
* make tires that have not very much tread to wear through
* make the outer tread extremely hard so it wears (testably) much more slowly
* blame consumers for driving the tires wrong rather than make safe tires because we can hide behind T&Cs and our army of lawyers when accident rates inevitably increase
* put our fingers in all the tire installation and body shop pies to prpfit off of the new economic conditions that were created as a result of this tax