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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

#41

Post by nayuki »

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…

I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage).

I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.

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

#42

Post by chrisco255 »

cozzyd wrote: post #32
cyberax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hmm pretty sure this train I'm on right now is taking me home from work. Transit is such a failure that I haven't owned a car in 15 years...

Thats nice but that doesnt work for vast majority of the United States. Cars are here to stay. People live in the suburbs you aren't going to mass migrate hundreds of millions of people.

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

#43

Post by chrisco255 »

csto12 wrote: post #2

A deeply unserious country. What else can you say?

This is how Congress works, for better or worse. Bills get proposed all the time by any one of its five hundred or so members, it doesn't mean either one will pass. That's democracy.

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

#44

Post by philipkglass »

legitster wrote: post #24
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.

Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.

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

#45

Post by 6r8lt7kt6ikir6 »

frankbreetz wrote: post #17
nyxtom wrote: post #12

I'm getting really tired of every single attempt to be taxed into oblivion. Just leave me the hell alone

You would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?

"If you don't like it, why don't you leave the country?" - common denominator who thinks he is not a pig.

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

#46

Post by jerlam »

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,…

The EV tax was only implemented because it's easy to implement both politically and practically, not because it's the best solution.

A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.

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

#47

Post by legitster »

philipkglass wrote: post #44
legitster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.

Individuals would have to track miles out of state or off of public roads.

It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.

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

#48

Post by quickthrowman »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #23
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.

The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below.

Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225

Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.

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

#49

Post by legitster »

tw04 wrote: post #39
legitster wrote: post #22

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 publi…

> 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). “Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the sam…

> I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.

I mean, this is more or less how it already works with all the federal department funding. The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.

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

#50

Post by philipkglass »

legitster wrote: post #47
philipkglass wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.

Individuals would have to track miles out of state or off of public roads. It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.

No, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions. The state where the car is registered collects the tax for every mile driven. It would lead to some mistakes in the small scale (what if I live in northern Oregon but do most of my driving in southern Washington, or vice versa?) but it seems like a serviceable alternative for the macro-scale problem of how states can replace the funding from gas taxes. And it does so without the expense or privacy invasions of schemes like automatic plate tracking or in-car GPS tracking.
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