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.
Huge Constituional issue. You buy a car, you own it. Disable the device, period. ew-3 mentions a good point, btw… just sitting around in a parking lot the error on the GPS device will register some distance traveled.
Mark
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!
Tax politicians……..by the word.
Car travel is already taxed by the mile.
It’s called fuel duty.
>> Northern California Bureaucrat says:
May 6, 2011 at 11:17 am <<
NCB, I'm pretty sure the current fuel taxes more than cover road and bridge needs. No need for higher taxes, just stop diverting it to other wasteful government spending.
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
The funny part is that they would need to redistribute the tax to the states according to the total road length and usage I suppose. The states would then built lots more roads to collect as much as the tax as possible.
If you drive in California where the road taxes are about 0.60 per gallon and you drive 15,000 miles per year, you pay about $225 per year in taxes. The truck is paying about 30X what you pay. As for damage, it isn’t the number of axles, it’s the tire contact area that’s important. So the four-axle semi has fourteen tires, and let’s say a contact area 1.5 times yours per tire, so he’s got a 5:1 advantage in contact area and a 14:1 margin in rolling weight for a net of 3:1 in damage while paying 30:1 the fees. If I was a trucker, I’d be mighty unhappy.
This idea has been bouncing around Massachusetts for a long time now. The rationalization is the “hybrid” problem, which I think now accounts for approx. .5% of cars in Mass.
Mass can’t use the mileage checked during inspections because they can’t determine if all the miles were driven in Mass, so that would be wrong. So now they want to put in place a NFID system that would essentially track your car everywhere in the state.
Amazing. Of course, the gas tax doesn’t go away, this tax just gets ADDED.
I’m just amazed that the voters keep these asshats in office.
You just can’t make it up.
JimB
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.
Denied but illustrative eh? The fact that people took time and care to frame and consider something like this reflects upon the current Administration….
Are those Gov’t jobs that could be eliminated?
<<>>
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.
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.
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!
Ladies and Gentlemen, those of you who are talking about disabling their GPS receivers are missing a trick.
Go up to your local avocate for this type of technology, whether it be a greeny, or a grasping politician, or even a grasping goverment. Use a GPS transmitter connected to a laptop to persuade your local friendly avocate’s car (for they pray at the church of ‘do as I say, not as I do’) that it has travelled around the local city, in rush hour, for several hours, at a speed that is well in excess of the speed limit.
Be sure to engage with them to ensure their faith in the technology that will Save the World (TM) never wavers. Even during the bankruptcy court appearences.
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.
Have I been spam canned?
GPS in cars? Checks you’d mileage – and your speed.
Ah, now you’ve got the real reason.
Northern California Bureaucrat,
There’s plenty of spin in that WaPo article. As it turns out, federal highway funding is substantially increasing.
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.
Land of the Free? Home of the Brave? (RIP)
next ?
Bio Micro Chip Implant
Tim,
You are correct, I get a report from GM every month. They know the number of miles on the odometer, the tire pressure, etc etc.
While I am totally against the mile tax, the fact of the matter is that we do need a system to tax the electric cars since they are not paying their share of road/bridge building/maintenance.
This is the unintended consequences of pushing and subsidizing a stupid concept like electric cars for which there is no useful battery, except for local runs, and then realizing the Government will not collect the road and transportation tax via fuel tax which runs up to 70 cents per gal in some states. Of course some of that tax is diverted for other purposes so our roads are not properly repaired.
I would support a mile tax for electric vehicles only so that they pay their fair share.
Of course when Obama doubles the electricy costs as promised, they will really pay.
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.
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?
“Tom T” – stupidity, naivity?
HTH 🙂