Posted on 10/02/2021 9:09:06 AM PDT by EBH
(AP) – CLAIM: President Joe Biden has called for a “driving tax” that is estimated to be 8 cents per mile.
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.
THE FACTS: As members of Congress mull a bipartisan, $1 trillion infrastructure bill that was approved by the Senate in August, social media users are misrepresenting one aspect of the massive legislation.
An image repeatedly shared on Facebook shows a screenshot of a Newsmax report on “Biden tax increases” that refers to a “driving tax.” The screenshot shows bullets saying “per-mile user fee,” “estimated to be 8 cents per mile,” and “amounts vary depending on vehicles.”
Text above the screenshot adds the: “Just to put this in perspective, if you drive 26,000 miles X 0.08 per mile = $2,080.00. [now get mad].”
But the Biden administration has not proposed such a mileage tax, as the image falsely suggests.
What has been proposed is a pilot program that would study the mechanics of such a tax, said Andy Winkler, director of infrastructure projects at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
That program — a “National motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot” — is included in the infrastructure package still before Congress.
“It is not a tax, it is not on everybody and it is voluntary,” Winkler said.
The idea, he said, is that volunteers with passenger and commercial vehicles across the country would participate in the program that would provide insights into how such a per-mile fee could be collected. Such a tax has been weighed as a potential replacement for the gas tax, he said.
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.”
The proposal for the pilot program also does not include an “8 cents per mile” rate, or any rate for that matter, Boesen said.
It’s unclear why that specific rate was referenced. An inquiry to Newsmax about its report was not immediately returned.
Boesen noted that a proposal floated in Pennsylvania suggests using a tax of 8.1 cents for each mile traveled, among other changes, and phasing out the state’s gas tax.
___
This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
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?
Yearly vehicle safety inspection. Inspector jots down your mileage. You pay the tax when you renew your registration. Simple.
[ This isn’t about collecting revenue, it is about control. Taxing people per mile would require installing a massive infrastructure to track vehicles and sensors in the cars. There is no way that this predatory government will trust Americans to voluntarily report their odometer mileage every so often.
There are much more efficient ways of raising revenue than this approach. ]
We will just buy the already developed tech FROM China...
YES!
Estimated to be 8 cents per mile?
That’s a effin’ laugh. Eight cents, then 10, then 12, then.....
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?
So they can keep collecting the gas tax after they shut down our gas and force us to electric cars or bicycles, scooters, or roller skates. Odometers will be required on all wheels to be opened and read at annual inspections.
You just made my point - even if the feds "just buy the already developed tech" it isn't free and it does not mean that the tax will overcome the cost to collect it. This sad scheme is about control and any revenue gained is incidental.
In my state, people who own electric cars pay a few hundred dollars fee every year
That seems totally reasonable and keeps the federal government out of it.
It will never stop.
Feinstein proposed legislation to ban folks that haven’t got the shots from domestic air travel.
That would leave driving as the only option for some.
Price of gas keeps going up, tax’d per mile. Guess what. No more traveling. No more seeing your family or friends until you submit.
How will it be enforced?
The government would love to get all the money it generates, but one of the major downsides of this kind of tax scheme is that it is very costly and unwieldy to administer. One of the most appealing features of the fuel tax is that it costs very little to collect the money. You have 120+ million motorists paying this tax every time they buy fuel, but the actual taxes are only paid to the government by fewer than 15-20 major wholesale fuel distributors around the country.
“estimated to be 8 cents per mile,”
So, my car gets 32 miles per gallon of gas. The current fed tax is 18.3 cents per gallon. So that’s $.183 per 32 miles. This suggested amount of $.08 per mile works out to $2.56 per 32 miles.
that is an increase of 1425%
Nope.
The plug to charge your electric car will establish a two-way connection, which could one day transmit data regarding where you drove, how far you drove, when you drove, and even how many people were with you. It could also download restrictions on all of those parameters, telling you where, when, and how far you could drive. All of this is, as I am sure we will be told, necessary for a more sustainable, more equitable, more perfect world.
Way back in 1972. when I was a senior in high school, we talked about some “relatively” crazy government proposals. My class mates would say to me, “People will never stand for that!
My response: I think what you mean is that “THIS GENERATION will never stand for that.”
And here we are.
I did a lot of bicycle commuting when I lived in Seattle. Based on this mileage tax on cars, that would have saved me a ton of money.
On a side note, thanks to airline restrictions for covid, we now drive to our old home of seattle to visit family. It’s a roughly 2500 mile drive. At the current tax rate of $.183 per gallon, and figuring $.35 mpg actual highway mileage on our car, that trip would cost us, in federal gas tax, $13.07.
At the $.08 per mile rate, it would cost us $200 in federal travel “fee”.
Nope.
This isn’t about collecting revenue, it is about control. Taxing people per mile would require installing a massive infrastructure to track vehicles and sensors in the cars. There is no way that this predatory government will trust Americans to voluntarily report their odometer mileage every so often.
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See the post immediately before yours.
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