Seriously, if this isn't being "proposed" then why do they need the money to study it?
Do they really think the public is stupid? 6 months from now we'll see this new tax and the lie will fall apart.
They are engaged in the first steps of enacting just such a tAsk
Does anyone remember, post 9/11, that the Dept of Homeland Security was just supposed to be a clearinghouse to make sure different agencies were not running concurrent investigations on the same people, to establish de-conflict on protocols and develop partnerships for agencies to work together? Where representatives from the various agencies would get together and compare notes?
I remember that.
Now they have armed agents all over the place trying to figure out if they’re Customs, DEA, FBI, Marshals, etc etc. etc.
It’s not a tax, it’s not on everybody, and it’s voluntary...
Until it’s not, comrade.
And why would you want a mileage tax Representative Donkey?
So the Republicans, who often live in the outer suburbs, pay more tax than the Democrats, who generally live closer to town.
They are going to have to do something about electric cars, which don’t pay the tax applied to gasoline. A mileage tax might make sense for them. I like the idea of paying taxes for roads based on how much you use them. Trucks pay a fortune - and they should.
When/if we go to electric vehicles, they’ll need to make up for gas taxes. States will want to do it too.
Gonna suck for us rural people. It’s 50 miles round trip to a town for us.
Much easier to ask, “What kind of disaster is NOT in the infrastructure bill or any other bill for that matter?”
This mess is a shop of horrors and it is BIG, not little.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The administration has not proposed that tax. A provision in Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill before Congress would establish a national study to assess how such a tax could be implemented. It would not actually enact that tax, nor it does not outline a rate of 8 cents per mile.
Can I ask a stupid question? Why in the sam hill would anyone want to merely study how to assess a type of tax, unless they had already conceived of the idea of implementing such a tax?
And does anyone seriously believe, that such a study of the tax, once completed, would conclude that we should NOT actually implement the tax???
This is sophistry to say they are merely studying this type of tax.
“You have to read the bill to find out what’s in it” - all 10,000 plus pages.
> AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. <
If the AP says that it’s false then it’s probably true.
8.1 cents per mile! Given the current Pennsylvania gasoline tax of 58.7 cents per gallon this proposal assumes the average auto only gets 58.7 / 8.1 = 7.2 mpg. I have not gotten that kind of gas guzzling mileage since I owned a 454 big block and had a lead foot.
Put another way, with the current middle of the road CAFE standard of about 30 mpg the 8.1 cents per mile tax amounts to something like $2.00 per gallon!
It doesn’t take anything but math to figure out these maggots are thieves and stupid.
https://taxfoundation.org/pennsylvania-considers-equivalent-2-per-gallon-gas-tax/
“Seriously, if this isn’t being “proposed” then why do they need the money to study it?”
The dems are insisting we move off gasoline/diesel fueled vehicles. Therefore they will have to implement an alternative to gasoline taxes.
They need a study to figure out how to implement a mileage tax.
To get more taxpayer $ the speed from “study” to “implement” is nanoseconds.
And since this administration know NO ONE will push back on any dictate, this will happen.
…and the Gasoline Tax will NEVER be repealed, in fact, that, too, will skyrocket because of “climate change..” Summary: The Demoncrat Party wants ALL of the money.
cause the gas tax isn’t a mileage tax...
But the Biden administration has not proposed such a mileage tax, as the image falsely suggests.
But the call was already out there for a mileage tax. Pete Buttfairy Buttigag (Transportation Secretary) called for it as a Presidential Candidate and as far back as March.
The bill may not have it in there, but it has been proposed by the Biden Administration that such a tax be enacted. And last I checked the Transportation Secretary was part of the Presidential Cabinet thus part of the President’s Administration.
We’ll Have to Tax Drivers by the Mile Eventually
And we shouldn’t stop there.
BY HENRY GRABAR
MARCH 31, 202112:06 PM
Bumper to bumper traffic on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles
What are we doing here? Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
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Ever since he was a mayor running for president, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been saying nice things about a tax on vehicle miles traveled. The idea is simple: tax drivers for every mile they drive. That way, as the U.S. automobile fleet electrifies and the gas tax revenues dwindle, we’ll still have money to pay for roads.
Buttigieg spoke favorably about a VMT tax in a congressional hearing last week and in conversation with a CNBC reporter. “If we believe in that user-pays principle—the idea that how we pay for roads is based on how much you drive—the gas tax used to be the obvious way to do it. It’s not anymore. A so-called VMT tax or mileage tax, whatever you want to call it, could be a way to do it.”
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says taxing drivers by the mile “shows a lot of promise” and could be a way to fund a big infrastructure overhaul. pic.twitter.com/fkI5nWt7sr
— The Recount (@therecount) March 26, 2021
The secretary walked it back on Monday, and the idea did not make it into President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, which proposes funding more than a trillion dollars in projects from other revenue sources including an increased corporate income tax.
Sooner or later, however, the VMT’s time will come, because the gas tax isn’t cutting it—and hasn’t for some time. Between 1947 and 2010, according to a study by PIRG, the amount of money the U.S. has spent on highways and roads surpassed revenues from gas taxes and other user fees by $800 billion in today’s dollars. The ratio is getting worse, since the federal gas tax hasn’t been raised in almost three decades and shows diminishing returns as cars get more fuel-efficient.
As a result, the gas tax has ceased to function as an effective user fee. Local road spending, in particular, comes largely from other taxes. Most states also exempt gasoline from sales tax, meaning that even state gas tax revenues are effectively redistributions from sales tax collections. In either case, the subsidy for roads from the public at large is immense.
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There’s a sense that a VMT tax would represent a radical departure from this model, which you can see in the way Buttigieg’s comments have riled up commenters across the political spectrum—an outraged and confused truck driver on Fox News, a righteous exurban socialist in the Virginia state legislature; a progressive writer at Grist. The complaint is the exact one that makes the gas tax a political football: It’s a tax on the middle class. (And with Democrats’ new focus on equity, you can easily make the case it hits low-income families hardest: While lower-income households drive less, transportation is a larger share of their expenses.)
Taxing mileage has one big advantage over taxing gas: It captures electric vehicles. It has one big disadvantage: It reduces the incentive to buy electric or fuel-efficient vehicles. (Oh, and you need to use a transponder or something to figure out how much everyone drives.) But their societal impacts are not so different.
One great thing about the gas tax is that it’s what economists call a Pigouvian tax: a levy on an activity with significant negative externalities. Some of those negative effects of driving—greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution—are a little less targeted by a VMT tax. Others, such as congestion, crashes, and the degraded quality of neighborhoods and the environment, get disincentivized by both taxes.
If VMT is just a way to raise money, then sure, it would be more progressive to use graduated property, income, or corporate taxes to fill the highway spending holes. But the fact that driving is an obligation thrust upon us all by poor planning, unrestrained highway budgets, and expensive housing in walkable neighborhoods does not make it an inequitable thing to tax. The inequity is not the tax; it’s the structural factors that make it so hard to find housing and jobs that do not include car ownership as a price of admission.
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VMT, like the gas tax, should be a levy that discourages the externalities associated with driving, many of which aren’t going away with piecemeal electrification. Its political unpopularity should restrain us from raising more money to build more useless roads. And if we’re designing a tax not just to raise money, but also to create marginal obstacles to driving more, then why not refine our approach even further? If the problem you want to fix is traffic injuries, adopt higher registration fees for high-bumper SUVs and pickups. If the problem is neighborhood congestion, put in parking meters. If you want the fee to be more equitable, attach steeper prices to each subsequent car registration—richer households have more cars—in addition to a baseline user fee based on how much someone drives.
This kind of innovation is already afoot in road pricing. Not only have two states—Oregon and Utah—adopted VMT pilots, but New York City has finally gotten federal approval to get started pricing access to its central business district. Several states now have dynamic tolling on highways to reduce traffic by the minute.
Taxing mileage may be a decent substitute for the gas tax, warts and all.
But why stop there? #
Yeah Slate, why stop there?
Gas taxes won’t be phased out. They’ll just pile this on top of all the ones already being paid.
“Likewise, Ulrik Boesen, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, said in an email the “purpose of this program is to study [vehicle miles traveled] taxes to understand how they could work.”
So in other words, they are not trying to figure out if the tax is needed, may be detrimental to the citizens, may have costs to trace and get....they are just saying they are trying to figure out how to implement it. They’ve already decided it’s coming.
wy69
This all just a case of covering each other’s asses. One of the first things Mayor Butthead did after he became Secretary of Transportation was call for such a mileage tax. Biden himself came out shortly after that and walked it back — probably at the urging of his own political team who knew damn well that this would be a highly regressive form of taxation.
How about a pilot program to study what happens when federal spending is cut?