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legitster 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tw04 39 minutes ago [-]
> 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 same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
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.
legitster 11 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
jaredwiener 1 hours ago [-]
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, even as usage stays relatively the same.
onesociety2022 1 hours ago [-]
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.
quickthrowman 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
seanmcdirmid 5 minutes ago [-]
I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.
mjevans 1 hours ago [-]
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.
seanmcdirmid 4 minutes ago [-]
Done that way, personal vehicles are barely going to be a blip on maintenance, but keep in mind this also pays for new construction as well as other non-pavement traffic infrastructure.
delichon 60 minutes ago [-]
That shifts the costs onto shipping companies, a more concentrated and coordinated interest with better lobbyists than the general public.
entropicdrifter 49 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like it's a fairer system that would be harder to corrupt. You're right, it'll never be implemented because we're totally infested by regulatory capture.
Why shouldn't the vehicles which do the most damage pay the most tax?
nayuki 41 minutes ago [-]
It's not flawed logic though. If, say, a mile of highway costs $1 million and it needs some expensive repaving/reconstruction every 20 years, who should bear the cost?
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
quickthrowman 8 minutes ago [-]
> The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general.
Society isn’t equally sharing the cost. The more gas or diesel you buy (and indirectly, the more consumer goods you purchase), the more taxes you pay towards road maintenance. A 4,000lb car does virtually zero damage to a road that is built to support an 88,000 pound semi tractor and trailer, road damage is calculated by taking the axle weight to the 4th power.
Are you paying the HVUT (Heavy Vehicle Use Tax) on your personal vehicle? I would assume you are not, heavy trucks in the US are assessed an annual tax to collect funds for road maintenance and repairs due to their weight vs a normal passenger vehicle. There’s also a 12% excise tax on the sale of all new heavy trucks.
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.
turtlebits 1 hours ago [-]
States already charge EV registration fees for lost gas tax revenue.
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?
seanmcdirmid 2 minutes ago [-]
Yes, and they have been for a few years now. I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026. Maybe Alaska?
bediger4000 45 minutes ago [-]
No, but the oil companies don't want EVs, so Republicans don't want EVs.
csto12 1 hours ago [-]
A deeply unserious country. What else can you say?
chrisco255 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
corygarms 1 hours ago [-]
So to recap: we should pave the earth for gas cars, tax EVs into oblivion for the damage they do, and call it "freedom."
cyberax 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cozzyd 51 minutes ago [-]
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...
chrisco255 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
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.)
HWR_14 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
JumpCrisscross 56 minutes ago [-]
> only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports
“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1].
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.
JumpCrisscross 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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
Tougher to notice. And you can pitch it as a windfall tax.
usefulcat 54 minutes ago [-]
You mean the same electorate that elected a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes, and then proceeded to do exactly that?
javascriptfan69 1 hours ago [-]
>The electorate is not so stupid..
Respectfully, they are.
hamdingers 1 hours ago [-]
$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 indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
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.
legitster 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
philipkglass 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
legitster 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
philipkglass 10 minutes ago [-]
No, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions or try to figure out where each mile was driven. 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.
m463 38 minutes ago [-]
tax what you want less of...
(wonder where the bill really originates from?)
ccamrobertson 1 hours ago [-]
It's difficult to take articles like this seriously when they use hyperbole like "...the most evil industry the planet has ever seen [oil]", never mind things like chattel slavery.
I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
sleepyguy 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
I mean we're dealing with an administration that paid off windfarms billions to NOT build
but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible
and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war
imglorp 1 hours ago [-]
We also subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct, and much more than that indirect (wars, pollution, warming etc). A 100% fossil tax is what we need to kick that habit.
Jblx2 50 minutes ago [-]
>subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct
I would like to see a source for that. Usually this is from someone who thinks corporate taxes should be on gross revenue instead of profit.
corygarms 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cory_garms 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nyxtom 1 hours ago [-]
I'm getting really tired of every single attempt to be taxed into oblivion. Just leave me the hell alone
frankbreetz 1 hours ago [-]
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?
6r8lt7kt6ikir6 31 minutes ago [-]
"If you don't like it, why don't you leave the country?" - common denominator who thinks he is not a pig.
nayuki 47 minutes ago [-]
When it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
- 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.
“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 same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
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.
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, even as usage stays relatively the same.
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.
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.
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
Society isn’t equally sharing the cost. The more gas or diesel you buy (and indirectly, the more consumer goods you purchase), the more taxes you pay towards road maintenance. A 4,000lb car does virtually zero damage to a road that is built to support an 88,000 pound semi tractor and trailer, road damage is calculated by taking the axle weight to the 4th power.
Are you paying the HVUT (Heavy Vehicle Use Tax) on your personal vehicle? I would assume you are not, heavy trucks in the US are assessed an annual tax to collect funds for road maintenance and repairs due to their weight vs a normal passenger vehicle. There’s also a 12% excise tax on the sale of all new heavy trucks.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/hvut/mod1/whatish...
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.
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.
“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ Art. I § 9
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.
Tougher to notice. And you can pitch it as a windfall tax.
Respectfully, they are.
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 indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
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.
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.
It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.
(wonder where the bill really originates from?)
I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
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/...
but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible
and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war
I would like to see a source for that. Usually this is from someone who thinks corporate taxes should be on gross revenue instead of profit.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.