Or in other words, we’ll all drive “taxis”, except for the chosen exempt few.
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.
Cars are already taxed per mile. Doesn’t the government realize they tax gas and diesel. With the vehicles getting the worst gas mileage paying the most per mile in taxes.
“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.
Stephen Rasey says:
May 6, 2011 at 9:38 am
Every state in the union has a vehicle inspection sticker for checks on safety. IF tax on miles driven should be applied, this is clearly the cheapest mechanism.
I don’t know where you got this idea, but its absolute twaddle. There is no such thing in many states.
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?
How long do you think it would take for some teen-aged super-geek to hack into the system and wreak havoc?
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.
This is dumb… the best answer is to eliminate the gas tax completely and charge a road use tax annually when people register their vehicles…
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.
Another anti-growth tax “consideration”.
charlie says:
May 6, 2011 at 8:56 am
How to tax by the mile;
Form 1040:
How many miles did you drive last year ____________
Multiply the amount in the line above by 0.006 enter result here _________
The weird thing is for an average driver getting 25 mpg we are arguing about $100.
Irrelevent as to the amount since the gas tax is not going away this is an additional tax plus an invasion of privacy and a hidden attempt of keep track of citizens. You can send in $100 extra anytime you want.
How easy would it be to come up with a device that plugged onto the devices antenna, and fed it a signal telling it your car was in your garage, 24/7 for the entire year?
*facepalm*
You’ve missed the point ENTIRELY, I see… 😉
As stated by others including TimC above, the UK floated the idea of ‘road pricing’. I would think that the ideas in this ‘shelved’/’tabled’ paper would be the same. There is no point using GPS just for mileage, it is used to track the vehicle. The taxation would be based on what roads the car was driven on and when it was driven. So a car on the DC beltway between 6:30am and 9am would pay the maximum whereas the same car driving on a country road say near Newton OK, at 3am would pay the minimum. And of course everyone is now tracked whenever they leave home. Tie that data to the cell phone data and you get a complete country wide tracking system.
The sale of GPS jammers would increase hugely. They are already used by trucking company drivers to avoid dispatch tracking them for just this reason.
“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.
Last night in the Republican Presidential debate, Governor “Green” Pawlenty apologized for his former position on man-made global warming, but we in Minnesota still have to live with his Minnesota Renewable Energy Bill (http://www.startribune.com/politics/11759511.html), which gave us inefficient and government subsidized windmills. Governor Green also supported a pilot program to test the idea of charging drivers for each mileage they drive (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/18/mileage_tax/) and (http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/19/ugh-gop-minn-gov-pawlenty-studying-mileage-tax-satellite-based-tracking/).
I hope the Republican Party wakes up and realizes that this guy is a progressive, and not a conservative.
Keep Smiling 🙂
Jeff
@Anything is possible In the state of MA, your odometer reading is recorded when you take your car in for its annual safety check.
Need more money for road repair and improvements? Stop raiding the highway “trust fund” for railroad follies.
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.
A couple of points:
– Some states have annual inspection requirements, others don’t. Other states require cars to be checked on a less than annual basis. To make your implied proposal work, all states would have to impose such inspections and they’d have to be annual.
– Due to the expanse of our country, we have a problem which doesn’t really show up in the UK – private roads used for logging, mining, ranching, farming and other private roads. These are roads which should not be subject to road taxes. Currently, operators of vehicles using these roads can apply for rebates on their gas taxes, but there’s already a problem in verification of mileage on private roads. It seems to me that a simple odometer reading would do nothing to ease that and in fact might exacerbate that problem.
– Charging a flat mileage tax is regressive in the extreme because it fails to acknowledge that not all highway miles driven are equal. Our current scheme of taxing the fuel does a much better job at rewarding those drivers who use the roads less, and/or who subject the roads to less wear by driving smaller/better mileage vehicles. I’ve ridden motorcycles for a long time. My Harleys get between 45-50 mpg. Why should I pay the same tax as a vehicle which gets half that mileage and which weighs 2-3 times as much?
Let’s forget about the tax(i) — what’s wrong with current electronic odometers? Why a GPS?
So, if they tax on miles and remove the existing gasoline/diesel taxes, you can expect lots of huge gas thirsty and polluting engines on the roads. That would not be a step in the right direction to reduce (real) pollutants.
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.
The solution isn’t taxing miles driven. The solution is cutting government spending in order to drive private sector investment and growth (hence more tax revenue). A miles driven tax will, as always with new taxes, cause unintended consequences, none of which will drive growth and all of which will ensure whatever tax revenue estimates these numb nuts believe will occur, won’t.
When will the numb nuts in DC figure this out?
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.
With these two statements, I think one is not telling the truth.
“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.”
And from the cover page of the bill.
However, all of the dollar amounts authorized in the bill are consistent with the numbers put forward in the Department of Transportation’s FY 2012 budget request, even at the sub-sub-account level put forward in detail in the Federal Highway Administration’s budget justifications. And since those dollar amounts had to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget, and cannot be
changed (at least at the account level) without further permission from OMB, the
language and policy accompanying the numbers is probably pretty far advanced.
Another fun FOIA provision is futher down
(4) TRANSPARENCY.–
(A) OPEN MEETINGS.–Interested persons shall be permitted to attend meetings of the Group or file statements with the Group, subject to any reasonable rules or regulations that may be prescribed.
(B) AVAILABILITY OF RECORDS.–The records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendices, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which are made available to or prepared for or by the Group shall be made available to the public.
(C) LIMITATION.–The requirements of this paragraph shall not apply if the Secretary determines that it is in the public interest that such meeting or information should be closed to the public in order to prevent the disclosure of matters that–
(i) should be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;
(ii) are specifically exempted from disclosure by statute;
(iii) involve trade secrets and commercial or financial information that are obtained from a person and are privileged or confidential; or
(iv) would likely frustrate the purposes of the Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office.
No you cannot know what we are doing, because is would likely frustrate us??!!