Posted on 05/05/2021 3:41:04 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The battle is on, as President Biden pushes a raft of tax hikes to pay for roads, bridges, green energy, and expansive new social programs. His plans are generally popular—but nobody wants to be the one footing the bill.
Business groups argue that instead of raising corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure, as Biden wants to do, the government should rely on user fees such as tolls and dedicated taxes, so that people getting the benefit of the new asset bear the cost. Higher corporate taxes can depress investing, send US companies overseas and trigger aggressive tax avoidance. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, calls corporate taxation “the most economically destructive tax” and says “a better way to go is to keep to the tradition of levying user fees, so that those who use (and wear out) the infrastructure pay for its construction and maintenance.”
Makes sense! And user fees work well in some instances. They help fund ports and airports, because it’s easy to assess the fees on companies that use them and then let those companies pass them on to their customers as the market allows—like the fees you see listed on an airline ticket. Tolls work too, to the extent that drivers are willing to pay $7 to cross a bridge or 25 cents a mile to use a turnpike. (Sometimes, they’re not.)
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
PING!
Problem solved, repeal the 16th amendment.
If the people who use public transport, like buses and subways, in cities had to pay for it fully, would there be any in the USA?
Lol. Rearranging chairs again.
I thought that Obama guy fixed the bridges.
Leroy’s daycare is free Miss Parent, but there’s a $30 mandatory lunch fee levied daily.
That would still represent a government-subsidized service. You can’t kennel a dog at a vet to go on vacation where I live for $30 a day.
Probably not.
They put in a bus line at tremendous cost where I used to live. At the end of five years they deemed it a success when it reached the point of paying 50% of its operating costs. That was just fuel, general maintenance and drivers. Any infrastructure cost was picked up in toto by the city tax payers.
Often the buses were empty and it took two traffic lanes out of use during rush hour.
Also many of the passes were subsidized by the city so even the 50% was not real.
The author completely overlooks a major problem with this tax and another easy work-around to what he describes as the primary objection to a VMT tax.
First, the work-around ...
The privacy issues are certainly first and foremost in my mind. That only presumes, however, that the VMT tax is based on the distance AND the locations where motorists travel. It doesn't have to work that way. Instead of monitoring your vehicle every place it travels for the purpose of calculating this VMT tax, the tax could simply be calculated based on a monthly or annual odometer reading through an electronic interface that is already built into new cars anyway.
More importantly ...
What the author failed to point out is that one of the biggest factors in favor of a motor fuel tax is that the cost of collecting it is very small. The Federal and state governments (combined) collect tens of billions of dollars in fuel taxes every year, and I believe the cost of administering these taxes amounts to less than 1% of the revenue raised. That's because there are probably fewer than two dozen entities in the U.S. -- the major fuel wholesalers and distributors -- who actually collect these taxes and pay them to the governments. That all goes out the window when you go from two dozen to several hundred million direct taxpayers for a VMT tax. Estimates I've seen suggest that the collection cost would exceed 20% of the revenue generated, and the Federal government would need to establish a new agency comparable in size to the IRS to ensure that everything is done correctly.
Shovel ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready.
$0.00
the smartest tax ever
Enough
Already!
It’s simple really:
Peeps who don’t live in ‘Rat Utopias shouldn’t have to support ‘Rat Utopias.
Tax government pensions.
Abolish All Defined Benefit Public Employee Pensions, including Congress, roll them all into Social Security Eliminate ALL Taxpayer Funded HealthCare Benefits for ALL Public Employee’s, they can Join Obamacare. that should cover it
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
Tax Govt more...we need less of it
They aren't already?
I know military pensions are taxed.
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