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US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

electrek.co

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Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#21

Post by mjevans »

jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight.

Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.

That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#22

Post by legitster »

I want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second:

- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.

- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).

- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.

- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.

- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.

There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#23

Post by onesociety2022 »

jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#24

Post by legitster »

hamdingers wrote: post #5

$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive? This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee. But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for in…

Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).

A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#25

Post by delichon »

mjevans wrote: post #21
jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight. Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections. That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of pla…

That shifts the costs onto shipping companies, a more concentrated and coordinated interest with better lobbyists than the general public.

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#26

Post by back7co »

mjevans wrote: post #21
jaredwiener wrote: post #13

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up,…

Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight. Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections. That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of pla…

This unfortunately is flawed logic if it's intended to tax EV's as it would target semi trucks and heavy duty trucks more than EV's. https://ctr.utk.edu/electric-vehicles-damage-roads/

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#27

Post by sleepyguy »

Expect more and more attacks on anything that challenges the status quo.

Great article from the Guardian.

The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly

>Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#28

Post by JumpCrisscross »

HWR_14 wrote: post #11
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Gas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)

> If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still. The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.

> only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports

“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1].

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ Art. I § 9

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#29

Post by [deleted] »

HWR_14 wrote: post #11
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Gas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)

> If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still. The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.

[deleted]

Re: US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

#30

Post by usefulcat »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #6
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Gas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)

The electorate is not so stupid that "it turns out people really don't want what I'm peddling so I'm just gonna reframe it and those idiots will be none the wiser" is likely to work. Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.

You mean the same electorate that elected a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes, and then proceeded to do exactly that?
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