> Traditionally, that has been in the form of fuel taxes.
The fuel tax has three major issues:
- the US one is a flat fee not indexed to inflation and has not increased since 1993, so the purchase power of it has gone down as well as its percentage of the sale price since gas prices have risen a lot since 1993. no politician at the federal level is brazen enough to suggest actually raising the gas tax and hitting Americans in the pocketbook. In fact the fury is so bad that Massachusetts voters repealed inflation indexing for its state gas tax, because everyone wants the better roads but no one wants to pay for them.
- the wear and tear on the roads is not linear with weight. The federal government estimates that one 18-wheeler causes the same amount of road damage as 9,600 cars. The relationship between fuel price and road damage (which is what ultimately impacts the maintenance expense) is not reflected in a gas price even if trucks are less fuel efficient.
- the decrease in gasoline needed. Fuel efficiency is very good, and transitioning away from fossil fuels even better, but those cars and trucks will end up paying less money while causing the same amount of road damage as they did before.
> fuel price and road damage is not reflected in a gas price even if trucks are less fuel efficient
It’s almost like you’re saying a fuel tax shouldn’t incentivize fuel efficiency. I am saying it should. Broadly, heavier vehicles do definitely burn more fuel, hence why diesels are more prevalent with heavier workloads.
well it depends on what the gas tax is for. If the gas tax is to pay for road maintenance, then ideally the gas tax for a given vehicle should be commensurate with the amount of road damage that we then have to pay for through maintenance. the correlation however is not nearly strong enough between the tax and road damage, so the tax for heavier vehicles should be hiked significantly.
if you want to charge a carbon tax to dissuade burning fossil fuels that's another thing entirely, but the gas tax has never really been designed to do that, it's always been for road maintenance. Electric vehicles don't just become weightless on roads.
The fuel tax has three major issues:
- the US one is a flat fee not indexed to inflation and has not increased since 1993, so the purchase power of it has gone down as well as its percentage of the sale price since gas prices have risen a lot since 1993. no politician at the federal level is brazen enough to suggest actually raising the gas tax and hitting Americans in the pocketbook. In fact the fury is so bad that Massachusetts voters repealed inflation indexing for its state gas tax, because everyone wants the better roads but no one wants to pay for them.
- the wear and tear on the roads is not linear with weight. The federal government estimates that one 18-wheeler causes the same amount of road damage as 9,600 cars. The relationship between fuel price and road damage (which is what ultimately impacts the maintenance expense) is not reflected in a gas price even if trucks are less fuel efficient.
- the decrease in gasoline needed. Fuel efficiency is very good, and transitioning away from fossil fuels even better, but those cars and trucks will end up paying less money while causing the same amount of road damage as they did before.