The "Taxing your car by the mile" plan

There will be a need to move toward this form of a road tax as the plugin hybrids and electric cars increase in popularity. They still use the roads but won’t use gas so they need a way to collect road taxes for them that were previously collected as a per gallon gasoline tax.

if this guy is so smart….
…why does he keep making the biggest bone head mistakes anyone has ever seen
and what’s happened to Biden…
..did they finally cut his tongue out

How would this be different than reducing the Standard Mileage Rate?
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=232017,00.html
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. . . and they will also know where you travel to. This is not only a stupid tax proposal, this is an incredible violation of privacy. Electronic monitoring of where you fill up and how many miles you traveled.
Their “electronic equipment” could easily be a GPS device to calculate the miles. Easy. And great to find out everywhere you go.

They forgot to exempt electric cars. Back to the drawing board.
============

This tax is the ultimate screw you to fly over states. Every town in Wyoming is at least 100 miles from the next one.

It is money. Always more money for the Government.

Oblunder wants people to go back to the horse and cart. (One caveat, the cart will have to be made in China)
How long before cars have government warnings written all over them? I am sure soul-destroying Lisa Jackson is already working on it.

“Fast Eddie says:
May 6, 2011 at 9:23 am
*roll eyes* I can see it now.
“Daddy can we go see Grandma for Christmas?”
“I’m sorry little Suezie, we can’t afford the new Obama transportation tax””
Actually Eddie even if you could afford it, the inboard government nazi tracking device would intervene tell you that the journey was unnecessary and would block any attempt to start the car.

I’m doing my part for global warming. I drive a 4×4 pickup truck that gets about ten miles per gallon and I burn firewood every chance I get.
I hope it warms up soon… this global warming thing isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It was 34 degrees when I rode my motorcycle to work today (my truck was out of gas… but I digress).

Beyond absurd.

Absolutely outrageous. The tax is in place already – the tax on gas. Absolutely no justification whatsoever for the tracking of vehicles. This is just the sort of thing that the the old USSR would love. If Americans love their freedom, the battle is not in Iraq or Afghanistan – it’s right in your own backyard. How much did you give up with ‘Homeland Security’? You see things like this and begin to wonder if the conspiracy nutters are right.

Welcome to the wonderful world of road charging. In 2005 the (then) UK government also announced plans for satellite-based charging, but then (a) worked out that you can’t levy taxation off the back of infrastructure belonging to another state (the US GPS system) and (b) found that the EU Galileo system which were contributing to (so could use to tax the good citizens of the this country) had turned into the usual EU graft-ridden shambles. We have therefore thankfully heard no more about it!
But I’m sure we could offer you good folks in the US a dollar or two if you allowed our govt to levy road charges off your GPS system. Mind you, for this to work you would have to promise not to switch it off and that you would maintain the system in working order for at least 20 years so that we could then base all our budgets on it, and all the relative charging rates for motorways, rush hours, school runs, evening travel and so forth.
Buddy, can you spare a dime (we’ve got a certain wedding still to pay for)?

As the WSJ editorial notably commented (don’t remember the quote verbatim):
Whatever is Obama’s and his sponsors’ spin about “the rich paying their fair share,” in the end, to finance their ideological agenda, they will rob the hard-working American middle class, for the same reason that Willie Sutton used to rob banks.

Hoser says:
May 6, 2011 at 8:54 am
More about tracking people than taxation. Plan first floated in Oregon a few years ago. If they really wanted money, they’d just raise the gas tax.
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BTW, did you know that Oregon was the state that “invented” the gasoline tax.

← Stanford claims farmers “dodged impacts of global warming” in the USA, but you have to find it first.
The “Taxing your car by the mile” plan
Posted on May 6, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Or in other words, we’ll all drive “taxis”, except for the chosen exempt few.
All private cars to be yellow in the future?
Yesterday on “The Hill” they reported this story:
Obama admin. floats draft plan to tax cars by the mile: ‘A vehicle miles traveled tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven’
…
The plan is a part of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act, an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly.
It is so spectacularly stupid, I kept waiting for it to show up on snopes.com yesterday. I just couldn’t believe it to be something under consideration. At 500 pages, the idea is one of many in the proposed bill.
Today at 10:15AM EST, the story was updated, and now the White House says this:
“This is not an administration proposal,” White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said. “This is not a bill supported by the administration. This was an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration, does not taken into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”
Translation:
…we are shelving the idea until after the 2012 election.
The plan was to put GPS devices on cars that would report the mileage. The Hill writes:
Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations.
I could see a huge black market for “patches and hacks” and other circumventions developing out of this. It would turn millions of people into criminals.

Well something of this type is coming to Europe in the future, as the GALILEO and EGNOS Projects (GPS system for Europe) continue to move forward. Road pricing of some type is inevitable over here… Clever systems based on time of travel, distance, type of roads, type of vehicle etc. have the potential to really change our way of life.
I have little doubt it will coming to the US in the future too.

“The sum represented by “XXXX” has never been less than US$7,000.”
According to my civil engineering buddies that’s only fair since they basically also do effectively all the damage to highways. Your average passenger car almost literally has no maintenance/repair load on a well built road, even in their 10 of thousands.
40ton trucks though… Yowsa, the slightest fault gets hammered into a pothole in weeks.

The EU is already throwing taxpayer’s money at its own “Galileo” version of GPS in order to tax vehicle movements. Over the last few years more and more company owned vehicles have been fitted with GPS tracking, causing complaints and poor morale about spying on employee’s movements, how are we going to feel when every driver has Big Brother looking over their shoulder 24/7?

This system was in a testphase for a year or two in the Netherlands. The law prepared was that you get fined 25.000 and a maximum of 4 years prison if you didn’t have a gps or it was tampered with.
In the end the plan was dropped because the complexity of making it work would cost a fortune and still would be waterproof quite prone to failure.
So don’t worry, if it can’t be done in a country of roughly 300 by 600 km2 with 16 million inhabitants,noway nohow is it going to work in the USA.

I often give my students assignments to sniff out government corruption, especially when the corruption involves technology or power. About five years ago my students brought me a report about taxing by the mile. They claimed that two of the sponsors of the bill had large Garmin interests. I can’t remember the original sponsors of the Bill, but their report seemed valid. I assume this is the same bill and the same lawmakers are hoping to acquire a nice power and wealth grab.

If so, an annual car tax based on mileage … could easily be imposed without the need to introduce expensive, and intrusive, electronic tracking equipment

*facepalm*
You’ve missed the point ENTIRELY, I see… 😉

“Every state in the union has a vehicle inspection sticker for checks on safety.”
Not even close. About half the states have yearly pollution control inspections. Maybe only two or three have safety inspections.
The last four states that I have lived in, there was no yearly inspection of any kind.

@Anything is possible In the state of MA, your odometer reading is recorded when you take your car in for its annual safety check.

D. J. Hawkins: The problem is that the damage to roadways goes up with the square of the per axle weight of the vehicle.
A fully loaded semi can weigh, 28,000 lbs (???) and has 4 axles. 7000 lbs/axle
My car weighs 2000 lbs and has 2 axles. 1000 lbs/axle
The truck is doing 49 times as much damage.
My car gets 40 mpg.
I believe a fully loaded semi gets around 3 mpg.
Which means that per mile, he’s paying about 13 times as much as I do in taxes, but doing 49 times as much damage.
There’s a pretty good chance that the truck you saw does a lot more than $7000 dollars worth of damage to the roads.

Let’s forget about the tax(i) — what’s wrong with current electronic odometers? Why a GPS?

I know I differ from many of my conservative brethren on this, but I would support slow increases in fuel taxes so long as the revenue goes towards building and maintaining roads and bridges. Phasing in five cents per gallon per year over five years isn’t going to feel too painful for most motorists. Another option is to change the tax to a straight percentage of fuel cost (similar to a sales tax). The current method of having taxes pegged at a certain number of cents per gallon means that any inflation reduces the value of the tax collected.

If this idea is ever put into action it will never work. People will yank out the devices in an act of open, civil disobedience. There would be a massive public backlash. I very much doubt that this idea will ever be put into action.

“We are already taxed for every drop of gasoline we buy”
Noooo. We’re paying it at about 9.9 USD/gallon, and going straigth up. Way to go.

Pay by the Mile is an idea that Washington State is considering.
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/03/feds-consider-m.php

In the UK you pay a “Road Tax” based on the size of your engine and the supposed “emmissions’ – ironically based on data from the 1960s and 70s (The Civil Servants are too damned incompetent to know they are being fed lies on this by their Greenpeace “Advisors.”). On top of that there is the fuel tax, currently around 4/5ths of the pump price which is £1.50 per litre (4.5 litres = 1 Imperial Gallon/ 3.6 litres = 1 US Gallon). The tax is quite a complex calculation, but starts with Excise Duty levied on “landing” of the Crude, then a further tax on “product” and finally a tax at the pump – then add 20% Value Added Tax … The retailer actually gets to keep around £0.02p per litre sold, the oil company keeps around £0.38p and the rest goes to the Treasury.
There are proposals, introduced by Blair’s Liebor Party, to change this system and make us pay a “Toll” to use the Motorways which would have been based on a rate per mile. As far as I know these are still on the table, despite the ejection of the anti-car, anti-freedom and anti-personal choice thugs of Liebor from power.
And let us not forget the city dwelling “greens” who think everyone has access to a bus or tube train every five minutes and can cycle anywhere they want to go. This sort of tax, and I suspect a large part of the anti-carbon dioxide support we see in various political circles is more about controlling the individuals mobility than saving the planet. Most of them want to keep the public where they are so they have control over your travel options, schools, universities, job opportunities and so on …
It used to be called the Feudal System, but Stalin and his merry men modernised it and proved it worked very well in the former USSR as it still does in China and North Korea.

Northern California Bureaucrat says:
May 6, 2011 at 11:17 am
Keep those ideas bottled up in your little part of the world. The rest of us prefer not to think like typical Kalifornians do. I lived there for a while and became an angry angry person in less than a year. Any idea that comes from that state about taxes is wrong. How I know that is that the idea never involves reducing or eliminating a tax. Always increasing or creating a new one. We don’t have a federal govt. income problem. We have a fed govt spending problem. It’s time to stop the feds from spending so we can keep some of our own money. NO MORE TAXES of any kind implemented in any way. Got it???

In the USA, gasoline is already taxed. Diesel fuel is already taxed. Electricity is already taxed. Therefore, gasoline, diesel, and electric vehicles are already taxed per mile. Heavy vehicles use more energy per mile, therefore road weight is already taxed. Inefficient vehicles use more energy, therefore inefficiency is already taxed.
I don’t know anyone stupid enough to believe that this proposal is about fairly taxing road use. That mechanism is already in place. This is about tracking vehicles, for which there is no legitimate justification.
“I think we should tax all people who stand in water. … Ooooooh!”

I am not against new taxes. I already pay for tolls on autoroutes and it varies by time and distance. What you want in a tax is that is easy to collect, and it not put to high a burden on any part the community The poor should not pay more than they can reasonly cope with, and the rich neither as they just go elsewhere. It could be a milage tax, but unless it is congestion related a petrol tax seems just more environmently friendly and better accepted.
The problem is not the government getting the money, it is what they do with afterwards. You could lower the national debt. You could fight the a war against those blow up buses or the twin towers. You could even improve the roads. However if they see it as “new money” I suspect they will spend it on some silly projects to save the plante.

wow, my 2 comments should have been moderated off the forum…not sure what happened.

Hey, the Dems are secretly rejoicing over the gas prices. After all, it is a part of the Agenda that they voted for.
“……Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years ……”Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu,…(now the Democrat Secretary of Energy) said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.”
Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2008
So, in September of 2008, the man that would become the current Secretary of Energy was laying out the Democrat Agenda. That was some two months before the election. The information was available and if you didn’t know that before you voted, then shame on you. And if you DID know but didn’t vote, then I don’t want to hear your whining.
Do you remember in the 2006 election when Ms. Pelosi said we should elect the Dems because “we have a plan” for gas prices? Only you had to elect them to find out what it was. For four years, they were in control of Congress (2007 thru 2010) and now you know what their plan is. We are now half way to their goal.
Too bad about the economy, though.
But then you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Besides, there would be plenty of money for HIGHWAYS, if the Dems didn’t throw our gas tax money away by building Toonerville Trolleys to nowhere. The pathetic fools in Austin just spent over $100,000,000 on light rail. And they used the existing rail lines instead of having to buy right-of-way and laying track. All that money and all they got was a slow trolley to Leander that nobody rides. But, it’s cool. Do you remember when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis-Saint Paul? They had transportation funds available to maintain those bridges, but instead they built a really cool trolley that nobody rides. People died when the bridge collapsed but they have really cool light rail. Cool. You see, in liberal areas there is no glory (or votes) in maintaining roads or bridges. But there are votes in light rail or bike paths. And then when people die because of how the politicians have misspent the tax money, they just blame George Bush. And voters believe them.
Too bad about the dead people, though.
But then you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

Tax on tires?

Although the privacy issue is huge, there is quite a bit of logic to this proposal to tax by the mile. We currently finance road and bridge construction through gasoline taxes. Even though an old 15-mpg car may not cause any more need for roads than a new 35-mpg car, the old car is paying more than twice for the roads as the new car. Now consider electric vehicles — or other alternative energy cars. They are not paying gasoline taxes and therefore are avoiding their share of road costs.

It is about spying on the citizenry, tracking people’s movements and fining them for every incident of speeding and knowing where everyone is at all times.
The easiest and most effective and anonymous way to tax per mile AND efficiently and effectively guarantee that the biggest polluters pay most in a guaranteed proportionate manner, is to tax gasoline at the pumps. It also guarantees that people are not criminalised as they will not be able to avoid it, and the tax revenue is collected.
Trouble is, you can’t use that to track everyone’s travel. You cannot obsessively and in paranoid fashion, monitor what all the people are doing that way.
This is why this issue, more than any other single issue, broke all records on the old No10 petition website in the UK when the then labour government were spending hundreds of millions of pounds trailing such a scheme.
This policy is not about pollution, congestion or revenue generation. Taxing the fuel directly would be more effective and efficient at meeting all of those goals. It is solely about totalitarian control.
Where I travel whilst going about my personal lawful business is none of their damned business. IF they believe I am breaking the law and should be tracked, it is up to them to prove it. Otherwise, LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!

The interesting thing is a number states are considering these per mile taxation’s for the very reason that they’ve jacked up Gasoline taxes so much, that in fact people are actually beginning to conserve, and use gasoline in a far more intelligent manner.
Typically people now park their truck more, and use their small lightweight fuel efficient car for errands and commuting now. And with these prices, people make sure that one errand is worth the trip (so you pick up the kids, but on the same trip you dropped off bottles at the depot before hand for example).
As a result many of these Governments are seeing their revenues flat line or get worse in regards to gasoline taxes. Therefore to those who run fuel efficient cars and drive lots of miles are seen as a group to tax and get revenue. After all, this group has more money in their pockets because they are intelligently watching how they spend their hard earned dollars of which the Government wants. So Governments are cooking up the idea to shift from gasoline taxes into some type of per mile taxes.
In other words if you do your green part drive and drive an efficient car and use less gasoline and lower your carbon footprint, the Government still intends to screw you out of anything you saved anyway.
Super Turtle

I’m betting good money that you DONT have to add anything to most cars; the onboard computers probably already store (or can be reprogrammed to) the annual mileage info. Note that you already get messages on oil changes and maintenance and that is based solely on mileage. This would keep black-markets in odometer rollbacks from happening or any new devices from being needed.

<<>>
The Highway Trust Fund’s cupboard is pretty bare, and it sounds like it is being subsidized with other money:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090503525.html
There’s a lot of deferred maintenance out there, especially for bridges. And just to be clear, I’m generally anti-tax; however, a tax on fuel when the revenue is dedicated to road construction and maintenance is a lot closer to a user fee than a tax. I’d rather see Congress increase fuel taxes to pay for road construction, rather than watch them approve another unfunded ARRA-type stimulus package which only increases the national debt.

Let’s just “go the extra mile” here and just have the government implant electronic chips into our bodies so that they can track all our movements. Why stop at autos? Heck, they could tax you for NOT moving (“the couch potato tax”) or moving too much (“the marathoners tax”) or for being out of your house after curfew, playing hooky on your government job…the possibilities are endless!

Alex said: It is money. Always more money for the Government.
Not always. This is more likely to be a distraction to the really dangerous plan to require companies, but not unions, to disclose their political contributions – retroactive two years. This is the most Chavez-like plan ever put forward by the House of Obama.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703992704576305414137806694.html
It’s not money, it’s power. If you have all the power you have all the money by definition.

GPS in cars? Checks you’d mileage – and your speed.
Ah, now you’ve got the real reason.

Simply increase petrol and car sales tax like we do down under. In Sydney we pay around USD 7 per gallon. Of course this will increase when we get the carbon tax everybody is keen on. More taxes, more government, that’s what you need.

I am stunned by some here supporting this. Oh it is just another way to tax and is needed because of hybrid cars you say. At best this is a tax increase and worse it is a tax increase with the government tracking your movement. How can anyone support this?

I read the entire thing (well, ok, skimmed all 400+ pages), and I didn’t see anything about GPSs or Electronic monitoring devices. There was a section about funding a study to investigate ways in which a mileage tax could be implemented for vehicles which don’t use Gasoline, but that was it. Can you provide page references for the GPS bit?

Smokey says:
May 6, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Northern California Bureaucrat,
There’s plenty of spin in that WaPo article. As it turns out, federal highway funding is substantially increasing.
– – – – –
Spending may be increasing, but dedicated Highway Trust Fund revenue is not. I’d rather have roads being paid for by fuel taxes than by deficit spending, essentially running up balance on the national credit card. Here are two paragraphs from that article you linked to:
– – –
The appropriations bill is an important part of the annual funding process; however, it does not solve the underlying problem of not having authorization legislation in place, and it does not address the revenue shortage in the Highway Trust Fund. The highway and transit programs are currently operating under a short-term authorization that expires on Dec. 30. If a long-term reauthorization measure is not enacted by that date, Congress must again approve a short-term extension to avoid a shutdown in highway and transit funding. Highway Trust Fund revenue is insufficient to support the funding level that was approved by the House.
In March 2010, $20 billion was transferred from the general fund to ensure that the Highway Trust Fund could meet its obligations. That funding is projected to support the current funding levels through August 2011. Congress will have to take action to further shore up the Highway Trust Fund to support the increased funding levels in the House bill.

They already tax gasoline. Isn’t that a type of mileage tax? Just increase the gas tax. Why install electronic gadgets?

This would have a definite impact on my volunteering to help small church schools in required environmental inspections (EPA-AHERA asbestos), & in my teaching efforts in a community college (I travel 50 miles one way). Living in a rural area, this would mean that travelling anywhere is very limited. Since I live on the east coast, I can just imagine what traveling is like for those in the western states.

D. J. Hawkins says:
May 6, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Nigel S says:
May 6, 2011 at 2:13 pm
D. J. Hawkins says:
May 6, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Wiki says damage is related to the fourth power of the axle weight (not the square and definitely not the contact area) which is what I was taught too.
I took a look, and it would appear you are correct. MarkW, I was wrong. It is, to overuse a phrase, “even worse than we thought”. Per Wiki, it would appear that in the example we’ve been using, the damage factor is 2,401:1.
It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been in the highway biz, but back in the day the damage multiplication factor for HCADT( Heavy Commercial Average Daily Traffic) was 10,000 to 1 for automotive and even that was considered an underestimate. The real difference is that the heavy vehicles, particularly the not insignificant portion who are running over axle weight, have the capacity to push the roadway beyond its design yield point, which is when the real damage occurs. The problem is exacerbated in areas which experience an annual frost cycle because when the frost leaves the ground the roadway goes through an extended period of vulnerability which is why here in the northern tier states we have weight bans posted every spring, which usually only come off some time between next week and Memorial Day. Semis do pay higher taxes, but no where near to the average burden they place on the infrastructure. But since trying to collect from them on a proportional basis would just inflate the cost of everything transported by truck, which nowadays is just about everything, the present system is accepted. The power of the trucking lobby may factor in to the calculation.

Well, this is a stupid idea as Atrios, a well know liberal blogger (who is an economist) has pointed out repeatedly. If we need more revenue for highway maintenance then why not raise the gas tax?
As structured right now, the gas tax does what it should do. Owners of lighter higher mileage vehicles, which do less damage to roads, pay less than owners of heavier lower mileage vehicles, which do more damage. Seems about right. If we need more money, raise the tax so that everyone continues to pay in proportion to the damage they do?
Taxing everyone on a per mile traveled basis, rather than connecting damage done however remotely (via the fact that heavier vehicles pay more tax), seems counter productive. And this does not even bring into consideration the privacy concerns and the cost of equipping vehicles to meld into a pay-by-mile system. Inevitably in our national security state much than just miles traveled will be tracked. I am a greenie, but I am also a civil libertarian and something like this offends me.

Part of the desire for this is to keep an eye on the masses. Not only can they tell how far that you have been, they can track you back to your favorite extra-legal activity.
This would also but a huge tax on rural people like myself with a 30 mile ride to the grocery store, and double that to the big city.
One angle of environmentalism is to herd us into sustainable little cities where we can be controlled through a shortage of resources and held as a docile population as tyrants prosper. This fits that meme to a tee. Eventually high gas prices, land use issues, and now a road tax conspire to make rural living as expensive as possible.
As far as using GPS, there would be flaws. As one other poster pointed out, signals are blocked by bridges, tall building and other sky obstructions.
I had a little taste of this a few years ago on my snowmobile. I Velcro’d my GPS to the dash and went for a ride, expecting to chronicle distance and top speed. When I returned I was shocked to see that I had ridden 35 miles and had a top speed of 38mph. The ground truth was that I had gone over 150 miles, and had exceeded 100mph at least 4 times.
The GPS couldn’t keep up between the heavy forest, the blockage from the windscreen, and the rapid changes in speed and direction. Admittedly it was a $99 yellow GPS, but it indicated flaws that could be exploited through creative antenna blockage and so on.
Paying out monies to individual jurisdictions would become burdensome too. I was in 3 counties in less than 50 miles today. County A gets $0.12, County B gets $0.07… It would become a problem requiring significant infrastructure and computing power to resolve and distribute collections to each entity.
Then there are people like me that won’t own a car that tattles on you. I’d rather rebuild a 20 year old car than have Big Brother watching my every move like throttle and brake position, speed, top speed, and so on.
OnStar=not in my car.

This has always troubled me, the EU want to do the same thing. However, we are already charged by the mile, as we pay tax on the fuel we use – this also acts to tax fuel guzzlers more than efficient cars as well. There proposal is to tax per mile at a fixed rate, this actually benefits fuel guzzlers and penalizes fuel efficient cars!
The EU version was to be based on roads used with some roads be more expensive than others, and also based on peak hours etc…still a silly idea in my mind!
New Zealand has a pay by the km system for taxing diesel already and no GPS is required, you simply buy a voucher for a few 1000 km from the post office or online. No need for big brother to track you. I would prefer the tax at the pump though to be honest – the GPS idea just has soooo many flaws to it!
Plus your being tracked constantly which smacks of big brother government wanting to use it for other uses as well, average speed calculations and automatic speeding fines, automatic parking fines, tracking “suspected” terrorists – though it could be useful for avoiding crashes / congestion and quickly spotting accidents – but it is definitely a double edged sword!

For over two decades, politicians over here in Germany are trying to implement this “Tax-per-Mile” – umm: rather “Tax-per-Kilometer”-system for privately owned cars, already.
But while all the technical gizmos are in place and are being used to tax the crap out of commercial trucks already, no political party actually dares to swap this system over to taxing private cars, too – that is: as of yet – because they know, their political careers will rot in Hell, if they should ever really dare to do so.
Public pressure is the only efficient tool you have to stop this madness in it’s shoes. Tell your congressmen, they will be toast, if they should ever dare try implementing the taxation-per-mile of private cars.
That’ll work. Nothing else will.

Just have all the Greenie cars to have an code that tells the power company the car is charging – then just tack on the required doubling of their electric bill. Better – when the person buys the car, just increase all their utility bills from electric to sewer to water by 175%. This include bikes and those wearing shoes – you know, all those things that use the road but don’t pay the gas tax.

The system has been running in Germany for years. It prices trucks per km at the moment (I think 18 cents/km). It used the gps system. Not satisfied with that the EU is launching its own gps system, called Galileo:
http://www.esa.int/esaNA/galileo.html
Probably because of mistrust of the US system but also because the Galileo system will have higher power output sats. And cost more (it would have been much cheaper to farm the sat construction out entirely)
The idea has been mooted in the UK:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1459230.ece
And met massive resistance via an online government petition:
http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/News/Search-Results/Motoring-issues/Politics/Road-pricing-petition-closes/
However, you can bet your backside that the firmware in all production cars in the EU has been designed to be added-to.
The idea has not gone away, it is just running under the surface.
The UK has, for years, been installing fibre-optic cables along major roads….I doubt they need the massive capacity for signs and cameras:
http://www.highways.gov.uk/knowledge/1299.aspx
Still, maybe they need it for the massive network of number-plate-scanning cameras the police have, some 10500:
http://www.kable.co.uk/national-anpr-data-centre-police-acpo-03feb10

Get used to it. Big brother has made mighty strides in tracking and taxing the free people of the world since the 1960s. It has been incremental and generally accepted and, as each generation becomes aware of their surroundings, normal to them.
My children laugh and comment on my paranoia as I describe the freedom of my childhood in contrast to the ever-growing, ever-infringing government-as-constant-companion state that they live in. My oldest son uses plastic for every purchase, including a pack of gum. It doesn’t bother him that the card contains a RFID chip that could be used for locating his position or that his phone tracks him with it’s GPS or that his phone can be used to listen to him without his knowledge.
Automobile computers already track a variety of metrics that can be used to reveal your driving speed and location history. This info can be downloaded wirelessly and without your knowledge. Cameras and listening devices are everywhere.
The biggest problem with all of this is the passivity with which we accept this. A lot of people on this board just shrug their shoulders and say “it’s only a few dollars a year, what’s the big deal?”. The big deal is this: We are living in an age where freedom is being limited daily and the rule of law is being gutted daily and flaunted in our faces.
Government has stepped into private financial arangements and picked winners and losers without regard to law. Government has spirited citizens away to secret prisons and held them for years without charging them with crimes. Government tracks nearly every financial transaction and every on-line query made by every citizen. Government assasinates foreign nationals and brags openly about it (I know they always did this but, they kept it covert because it’s illegal).
We all know about this and we either don’t care or feel that there is nothing to do. So, as I … wait there’s a knock at my door …

I don’t know about you people but if they tax me per mile i’m done being a good person in society. We need to stop this government, its going to break us and make us slaves. I will not be a slave i’m close enough now. We need to revolt we did it once before we need to do it again. And set up the same government with none career politicians, people who stay in office no more than two years, never to return to government, going back to there lives.

With a diesel vehicle, it is not hard to avoid being taxed at the pump. Someone I know, and he is not alone, collects used cooking oil from restaurants. Some days his exhaust smells distinctly fishy; on others, it has an appetizing sweet-and-sour aroma.Well, one should get a tax rebate for recycling. Waste not, want not.

Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.
Moron: a brainless idiot who votes for people who are obsessed with greed; who exhibit no quantity of brilliant behavior. Over the cliff followers.
A transponder in your car, followed by a chip up your…

“…..no family making less than $250,000.00 a year will see any form of tax increase…..”
~Barrack Obama, September 12, 2008
on video

Mark T says:
May 6, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Huge Constituional issue. You buy a car, you own it.
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Ummm, no you don’t. The State owns it. All you have is the Title.

I’ll post this anonymously from NZ – I normally use my real id – but for this post I’ll just use a nom de plume. I keep two speedo-heads here for my diesel trucks. Since we have to pay for fuel at the pumps which includes some but not all taxes and then pay at the post office to buy what is called Road User Charges (RUC), I prefer to maximise my investment in tax. So one speedo head on the truck shows a value that is legal, whilst I have another in bits being “adjusted” so it can be reinstalled as needed. It’s amazing how much fuel I go through with so few miles!!!! Works for me – but – pssst – don’t let on
Anonymous from Godzone

‘A vehicle miles traveled tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven’
Because using the odometer already in every vehicle wouldn’t cost enough.
Using GPS to track mileage??? There used to be some kind of web award for the dumbest use of expensive, high-tech “solutions” that replaced low-tech solutions that work better and cost less. This would definitely be a contender.