Gasoline tax: Eh?

[ciphergoth]

Motorists' habits spur call for tax increases
By JOAN LOWY, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Motorists are driving less and buying less gasoline, which means fuel taxes aren't raising enough money to keep pace with the cost of road, bridge and transit programs. [...] A roughly 50 percent increase in gasoline and diesel fuel taxes is being urged by the commission [...]

The dilemma for Congress is that highway and transit programs are dependent for revenue on fuel taxes that are not sustainable. Many Americans are driving less and switching to more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, and a shift to new fuels and technologies like plug-in hybrid electric cars will further erode gasoline sales.

According to a draft of the financing commission's recommendations, the nation needs to move to a new system that taxes motorists according to how much they use roads. While details have not been worked out, such a system would mean equipping every car and truck with a device that uses global positioning satellites and transponders to record how many miles the vehicle has been driven, and perhaps the type of roads and time of day.

I may be missing something but I don't get this at all. What's the problem with a tax that discourages people from driving large, fuel-inefficient vehicles? What's wrong with putting economic pressure on trucking to encourage development of fuel-efficient ways of moving goods? Sure, if there comes a time when there's lots of people driving cars that cause congestion and wear but don't consume gasoline, they're going to have to have an alternative way of taxing roads, but that day is a long long way off, and developing that alternative now will only help postpone it.

Fuel in the states averages 42.6 ¢/L. Fuel tax in the US varies by state but averages 12.4 ¢/L.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

The problem us that a gasoline tax is electorally impossible. That is to say: the American polity is no longer capable of any action for the common good that denies the consumer-culture clamour for immediate gratification.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Hint: maybe classifying corporations as "legal individuals" and thereby extending the first amendment right to freedom of speech to cover them was a mistake.

(Unpack: if corporations aren't people, they don't have a right to freedom of speech, therefore their public speech -- advertising and lobbying -- can be regulated, therefore advertising large vehicles and astroturf lobbying campaigns can be suppressed.)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Quite. But how do misleading - or socially-damaging - advertising campaigns by corporations differ from those of politically-motivated individuals?

Other than in scale, of course: the campaign budget of a presidential candidate or religious fruitcake is dwarfed by the advertising spend of every S&P500 corporation... Which is at the heart of the problem you are hinting at: it's not that corporations shouldn't have rights, it's that they are so much more powerful than any individual citizen and it's very difficult to force a corporation to discharge the responsibilities that go with citizenship.

Peer pressure certainly doesn't work, and consumer pressure is at best a very weak effect. Worse, many business schools teach that corporations have no responsibilities other than the need to make a profit for their shareholders: a dangerous fallacy that has been incorporated into the internal culture and executive policy of all too many institutions.

Nevertheless, the 'corporate culture' is a community of citizens and 'the executive body' at the head of it is a very small group of people. Often just one or two, and it's worth remembering that 'the corporation' is not an amorphous entity, but an exercise of will by those individuals. They can be identified, no matter how effective the corporate structure may be at shielding them from the consequences of their actions, and they can be influenced.

That is to say: they are human beings. Corporations are made up of people, and they are directed by people: they are not faceless monoliths.

What worries me is that the internal culture of these organisations encourages the rise of hyper-competitive sociopaths who present a facade of urbanity and sociability - and have succeeded in the intensely social task of building a governing coalition in the community of managers, investors and customers - but think and act in ways that are utterly at odds with the values and interests of the wider community of humanity.

I often wonder how this all plays out in the boardroom and the minds of individual directors: it isn't like the movies, where merciless men with white cats and a piranha pool command black helicopters and sinister henchmen with bad dentistry (the continuing survival of anti-vivisection campaigners and class-action lawyers is good evidence that corporate assassinations are a complete fiction outside Russia) but it seems all too easy for these men to distance themselves from the social and environmental consequences of decisions that are all too obviously damaging to people who are not so very different to themselves.

What mechanisms might reconnect them to the real world of their employees and the wider community of humanity? What is the analogue of the psychotherapy that reconnects the psychopathic individual to the wants and needs and feelings of the people he or she must live among?

Questions, questions... But the answer isn't limiting the 'free speech' of corporations. That's just tinkering around the edges of a problem rooted in failures of democracy and the concentration of power outside the checks and balances of a well-formed state.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Questions, questions... But the answer isn't limiting the 'free speech' of corporations.

Indeed not. The real answer is that our notion of good corporate governance -- and of corporate citizenship -- is broken, and we need to come up with a better model for running private enterprises within a larger society; one that doesn't reward sociopathic behaviour and allow them to externalize all liabilities to the public sector while avoiding paying the taxes that go towards handling those liabilities.

Shorter version: the most highly evolved vehicle of modern capitalism is broken.

[pir.livejournal.com]

That. Also cars and driving is seen as such an inalienable right that anything (like, say, real driving tests) which makes it harder starts people screaming about commie bastards and other such over-reactions.

There's no realistic way to make it fly.

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

California has a pretty stringent driving test...

edited to add:In so much of the US though, driving IS the only way to get around. You need a banger to get to and from your minimum wage job. SF and the major cities on the east coast are exceptions. People DO need their cars and without one can't get to and from work.

[pir.livejournal.com]

My description of the CA test would be "somewhat less of a joke than the rest of the country" rather than "pretty stringent". I did my US car test in MA which was an utter joke, NYC is somewhere inbetween.

I'm aware there are many socio-economic reasons for the way things are in the US with respect to cars (lived in Boston for 8 years). I think there are many ways it could be improved, particularly in areas with enough density to support more and better public transit than they have but that and the attitudes that surround it in the US are another rant entirely.

[latexiron.livejournal.com]

Surely roads/bridges that are used less will need less maintenance?

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

I can only begin to imagine the utter hell that will be working for the outfit that will develop the IT system to implement road pricing...

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of road pricing already. In Belgium you can sign up to allow the insurance company to track your driving on almost a minute-by-minute basis (not live, but they download your GPS and telematic data periodically) in exchange for lower premiums. You'd be surprised how close systems like this are to being ready for piloting.

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

ah but that's Belgium. Where the govt is efficient and reasonable :).

I can only imagine what it'd be like here :).

Thanks though, will go look that up... does it also automatically call the police if you have the car stereo on after 10pm, seeing as it's Belgium?

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

The real problem is the American habit of linking specific taxes to specific expenditures. In this case, transportation in general is paid for by the fuel tax. So the debate gets framed unhelpfully. The question shouldn't be "why not increase the fuel tax?", it should be "why not fund highways and public transport from general income?".

There should also, obviously, be a higher fuel tax, but that's a different question.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

There's a certain amount of sense in the habit here - it's about making road travel cost what it ought to cost, of handling stuff like road wear and repair that would otherwise be an externality.

I'm keen to see them take the money out of gasoline because there's another rather important externality when you burn that: carbon dioxide.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I agree mostly with this thread. Their goal is financing roads, and the issues are that the customer base has shrunk (less driving) and that customers are buying less per visit (technical improvements to cars).

The first issue is just an uncomfortable truth: The US needs fewer roads, which could then be maintainable. The second one is about the details of charging. In general, US politics don't favor infrastructure for citizens. They favor infrastructure for business. Public transport might win politically in the US if it was "sold" to business as a commuting solution.

My pet theory about large cars in the US is that they are not vehicles but defensive weapons. Think Newton's third law and E = mv^2. The guy in the heaviest vehicle survives (and kills the other) in a collision.