The state I live in charges electric car owners an extra fee when registering their cars to make up for the loss of “gas tax” revenue.
Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
131–140 of 360 posts
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. Please explain this. Are you suggesting governments can just stop taxing, and print the money to pay their debts with no ill consequences?
I'm not an economist. But I can see inflation being thought of as a type of tax. I'm not sure what kind of incentives that creates, and if those incentives are better or worse than the incentives existing taxes create. So, maybe?
Off the top of my head, some results would be:
1. No one wants to lend to your country again because you paid them back with currency far less valuable than expected
2. Nobody wants to use your currency as a means of exchange in international transactions because it can fluctuate suddenly
3. Massive redistribution of wealth from savers and lenders to borrowers (maybe a good thing on the whole, but devastating for people headed into retirement)
4. Anything (including govt. programs) that aren't indexed to inflation are suddenly far less valuable
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#133Everyone always seems to jump from general schemes (road tax, fuel duty) to Orwellian tracking (GPS everywhere). Seems like a simple scheme of mileage tracking and net charge tracking would do. You then have an overall energy use / mile figure that you can use to price each mile so people who buy more efficient cars are rewarded, and then charge by total number of miles, so people who do fewer miles pay less.
there's a couple of edge cases for odometer based tracking, namely private roads and tracks (e.g. racing)
It's not really an edge case. Everyone drives on paved private property (parking lots and the like). A flat 2% mileage reduction per year is probably enough to cover this for the vast majority of people. So if someone drives 10,000 miles a year, you'd charge them for 9800 miles with the assumption that they drove about 200 miles on private property that year.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#134Why not just tax the tires? Seems like they are good indicator on how much you are using roads and how many miles you drove etc. (Safety maybe an argument. Don't do it so people don't drive on shitty old ones)
That should work in places that have good inspection requirements. The downside is that it would penalize soft rubber as well as the usage of winter tires.
UTQG can be a factor in the calculation. Use a formula to normalize all tires to UTQG1000 before applying the tax.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#135Oh dear. Somebody didn't pass the geometric sequence question on their GSCE maths paper. The £35B revenue replaces itself, because money doesn't stop at its first use. What you don't spend on fuel duty, you spend on something else, which is subject to VAT, causes wages to be paid subject to PAYE, and profits to be earned subject to corporation tax. They then spend their increased income cause more tax to be raised an…
> a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. Please explain this. Are you suggesting governments can just stop taxing, and print the money to pay their debts with no ill consequences?
People think government works like a household budget - it doesn't. Think about it - who controls how much money is the economy?
Does someone measure 'okay the economy has grown 5%, it needs 5% more money to be printed?" No, nobody does that.
If the government prints zero money, the money supply can still quadruple, because banks create money out of thin air.
Which is exactly what they did prior to 2008. The reason government had to 'print' miney in 2008 is that they were replacing all the 'unsupported' money that was creates by banks, and then suddenly imploded.
As soon as you suggest government should print money everyone starts screaming inflation, but when private banks do it, noone blinks an eye.
The rules that allow banks to create money have changed dramatically over the past 20 years, and nobody is even discussing it.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
EV fees are already much higher than the state gas tax they replace in many places, especially considering the extra sales tax on the battery, tax on electricity, and even personal property tax on the battery. The idea EVs get a free pass is a myth.
> especially considering the extra sales tax on the battery, tax on electricity, and even personal property tax on the battery. I don't understand, do you pay an extra tax on the battery? Sales & property tax on a $60k car should always be the same, regardless of powertrain.
I'm guessing the argument is that EV's cost more upfront (since they include a battery, etc), but have a lower cost of use. Since you get charged sales tax on the upfront cost, EV's get charged sales tax on a larger percentage of the overall "ownership cost" of the car.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#137There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…
The “pollute more from the tires being heavier” is a myth, by the way. There was an article that circulated claiming this, but they never actually measured the tire pollution of electric cars, just extrapolated from ICE cars with really terrible and ultimately false arguments. Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less…
> Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere,
Seriously, this meme needs to die. A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340, and the model 3 is hundreds of pounds lighter than an SUV like the BMW X3.
Batteries are heavy, but so are gas engines & transmissions.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an economist. But I can see inflation being thought of as a type of tax. I'm not sure what kind of incentives that creates, and if those incentives are better or worse than the incentives existing taxes create. So, maybe?
Off the top of my head, some results would be: 1. No one wants to lend to your country again because you paid them back with currency far less valuable than expected 2. Nobody wants to use your currency as a means of exchange in international transactions because it can fluctuate suddenly 3. Massive redistribution of wealth from savers and lenders to borrowers (maybe a good thing on the whole, but devastating for peo…
All of your post assumes that when government creates money, it causes inflation, and when private banks create money, it causes no inflation. No such distinction exists. Most money is created by private banks.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#139I don't see a problem replacing fuel duty with an energy tax. Make it progressive. Let say the first 3000 kWh per year are priced at residential rate, apply higher rate above that. Households without a car will pay the same price as before. EV owners will pay a tax proportional to car usage.
If we revamp the fuel duty tax, why not introduce a carbon tax to pay for the impact of CO2 emissions on climate? This would make the fuel duty tax insignificant (the cost of climate change is more or less infinite now, given the current trends). Then, we can rethink the whole system and realize road-based transportation with private cars is not sustainable. And then, we can forget about fuel duty / energy tax becaus…
Personally I would support a uniform CO2 tax on everything, but I think it's more difficult to introduce and enforce. Energy tax + fuel duty can be a CO2 tax in disguise: there are already precise tools to measure and bill energy and fuel consumption, carbon intensity at any given time is known, and energy, heating and transportation are responsible for 73% of emissions.
What's left out is harder to monitor and regulate: agriculture (livestock, fertilizers, crop burning etc), construction and industrial processes, and waste. It may take a while before the society accepts that meat is never going to be that cheap again.
Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue
#140There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…
> There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road.
It is not what you call it, but what you spend it on.