The tax is intended to be a sort of Pigovian tax or sin tax: the motorists who cause the most road maintenance or congestion (by driving the most) ought to pay for it. Fair enough.
However, this tax ignores one basic aspect of reality. Heavy vehicles cause MUCH more road damage than light vehicles.
In fact, depending on the quality of the road, the damage caused by vehicles depends on the 3rd to 5th power of the per-axle weight.
Here’s a nice image from the Montana Department of Transportation that illustrates that point
As you can see from that graph, nearly all road damage is caused by trucks, and very little is caused by passenger cars.
Even if, for public-policy reasons, you want the tax to apply only to passenger cars, the tax still doesn’t make sense. An SUV that weighs twice as much as a compact will cause 8 to 32 times as much wear-and-tear on the roads.
So if the goal of the tax is to charge the people who cause the most road damage, then you might as well, like, charge the people who cause the most road damage. Or at least design the tax to give the market powerful incentives to buy cars that cause less road damage (i.e., light cars).
Fuel efficiency
We live in a time of limited oil supply, global warming, and dependency on despotic regimes for oil supply. Why, oh why do we still need to point out the desirability of using public tax policy to promote fuel efficiency?
Oil (gasoline) usage should be taxed. People who use more gas contribute more carbon to the air, send more money to You Know Who, use up more and more of our dwindling oil reserves. Let’s tax them more.
There is a common myth that asserts “well, now that everyone is driving fuel-efficient Priuses, if try to get revenue from gas taxes, we’ll run out of money.”
Guess what: we’re not all driving fuel-efficient Priuses. Fuel efficiency is barely changing, and gasoline usage continues to rise.
In fact, by doing away with the existing (small) gas taxes, it will be a step backwards on fuel efficiency, making SUVs slightly cheaper (relative to fuel-efficient cars) than before.
Congestion taxes
It can be argued that drivers should be taxed for causing congestion.
News flash! Congestion is worse at rush hour! Details at 11!
If you’re going to charge people for congestion, charge them for using the roads when congestion is worse. That will encourage people to shift hours thus ameliorating congestion. Which is, like, the whole point.
Conclusion
Overall, this tax will do nothing to reduce road damage, fuel use or congestion. Scratch that– its worse than nothing. It will make fuel-guzzlers slightly cheaper relative to fuel-sippers.
It would be much better if the tax was related to reality. A reality-based tax would do some or all of a) tax heavy cars much more than light cars, b) tax gasoline heavily, c) tax more at high-volume times than low-volume times.
Note that a) and b) are fairly similar to each other.
Ideally, I’d prefer a reality-based tax. One that would, you know, pay for (and reduce) road damage, fuel usage, and congestion. But if we can’t have that, I’d prefer nothing to something that will make these problems worse.
As you can see from that graph, nearly all road damage is caused by trucks, and very little is caused by passenger cars.
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This has been known for decades. And it has been ignored. Automobile drivers have been subsidizing large trucks. For decades.
are working on GPS jamming devices right now.
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I’m assuming then, that you would find some metric derived from axle-weight/mile acceptable? Even under that scenario, cars (the vast majority of vehicle population) are still going to pay more. I don’t disagree with that: to a first approximation the equivalent weight of light cars going over a road probably does the equivalent damage of one heavy truck. If you added all the weight of all the trucks and compared it to all the weight of all the cars… you’d probably get more tonnage out of the cars… Specially since a lot of freight goes by rail. If you were to set the car tax to max out at the axle-weight/mile tax of the truck, you’d probably get underfunded by population (would end up with x – y funding going uncollected, where x is car population and y is truck pop and x >> y.)
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You’re kinda arguing against yourself here: fuel efficiency has actually risen drastically, problem is we’ve traded those efficiencies for heavier cars. (Just because the numbers haven’t changed, doesn’t mean the efficiency hasn’t changed. All things not remaining equal…)
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Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not necessarily for this tax and I’m not opposed to a congestion tax. I need more info. I just don’t think your arguments are as tight as could be. Not having read the Globe article, I don’t get how they’re going to keep track of miles travelled. Are they going to start reading peoples odometers? What about miles I put on the car out of state?
When I said that heavy vehicles cause much more damage than light, I meant per-vehicle, not overall. Compare a 13-ton truck to a 3000 pound prius: the former causes two hundred to seven thousand times as much damage as the latter(depending on whether you use 3rd or 5th power of per-axel weight, which in turn depends on road quality. So, if you’re going by road damage, big trucks should pay hundreds or thousands as much tax (per vehicle) as passenger cars.
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It may be that there are hundreds or thousands times as many cars on the highways as there are trucks. I don’t know, and I’m not sure I care. But if so, then car owners will, overall, pay more than truck owners.
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Don’t forget, even if there are more tons of cars, trucks may still do more damage. A 5-ton-per-axle truck does 225 to 3125 times as much damage as a 1-ton-per-axle car– that is, as much as hundreds or even thousands of cars, even though the latter weight a lot more. Such is the power of exponents (groan).
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When I said fuel efficiency hasn’t gone up, I meant that mpg hasn’t changed much. In fact, I think it declined. You may be right that mpp (miles per pound) has improved, but I don’t think that this is relevant. What matters is how much fuel we use to get from A to B, not how many tons of steel we lug around while doing it.
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In answer to your question of how to enforce, one plan is to give everyone a GPS, which would track all miles and report back to base every time the owner entered a gas station. They are considering ways to safeguard people’s privacy (anonymous accounts, etc)
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I’d support this tax if it were linked to the cube of vehicle weight. And I strongly support a tax that is linked to oil usage, something we desperately need to discourage. The latter is basically a gas tax, and it would be repealed by the bills under consideration. That’s why I consider this bill a big step backwards
I read the story in today’s globe, and it seemed like a bad idea for fuel efficiency reasons. I’m glad to know about the other issues with it, too.
Did you go to the KSG? Great analysis. I thought the idea sounded stupid when I read the article. Isn’t it also a regressive tax as described in the article?
Thanks for your question, but I’ve picked up nearly all of what I know about energy policy from Daily Kos, The Oil Drum, Energize America, and Lou Grinzo’s site. There’s a lot of very high quality analysis on all of those. And they’re a lot cheaper than KSG đŸ™‚
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Yes, this is a regressive tax. But since its replacing the gas tax (also regressive), I’m not sure whether it would make the overall tax code much more regressive or not. (Probably a bit more regressive, since it would raise more revenue than the gas tax.) (Incidentally, the gas tax is one of the few regressive taxes I support. I strongly support the gas tax, and would love to see it increased.)
A gas tax would capture most of the difference in vehicle weight, as heavier vehicles have get less mpg, all else equal.
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So what are some differences between today’s trial balloons and a gas tax?
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* Gas tax does not require big-brotherish technological infrastructure and has small collection costs.
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* Gas tax doesn’t especially ration use by time, i.e. is not congestion pricing.
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* Gas tax rewards fuel efficiency.
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Of course the state’s capacity to raise the gasoline tax is limited to some extend by the tax rate in neighboring states. But shouldn’t we tax up to that limit before deploying confusing high-tech GPS license-plate-photo schemes?
Gas tax rewards fuel efficiency and doesn’t require high-tech big-brotherish technology. Pity it would apparently be replaced by this trial balloon. Some other points:
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According to this, Mass has lower tax rates than RI, CT, ME, and NY (although higher than NH and VT). We could raise it by 25% and still be cheaper than RI, by 70% and be cheaper than NY. So I think we have quite a bit of room to raise it.
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BTW, gas tax only captures only a small part of road-damage. Fuel efficiency depends roughly on first power of vehicle weight (and many other things). A truck weighing twice as much as a car (per-axle) would pay (very!) roughly twice as much as the car, even though it causes 8 to 32 times as much damage to the road. But its still a lot better than having both pay the same.
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And you’re right that gas tax wouldn’t address congestion. But that could easily be addressed via existing toll-booths. Raise the rate on the appropriate toll-booth whenever the relevant section of SmarTravler flashes red.
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Increasing the gas tax sounds like a good idea to me. Its not perfect, but its a lot better than this proposal.