‘As fuel taxes plummet, states weigh charging by the mile instead of the tank.”
That was the headline of a recent AP story, which should scare freedom-loving citizens everywhere.
And you can place the blame squarely on government-subsidized EVs for this terrible new development. [emphasis, links added]
The background is that state and federal gasoline taxes aren’t raising “enough” money these days to pay for roadway construction and maintenance.
And a big reason for the growing shortfall is the increase in electric vehicles.
EVs get massive tax subsidies to convince people to buy them, but their owners don’t pay gasoline taxes, for the obvious reason that they never have to fill up. The more EVs on the road, the less revenue the gas taxes raise.
So the policy geniuses in Washington have a solution: Impose a per-mile tax.
Some states are already experimenting with “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT) taxes, and the $1 trillion bi-partisan infrastructure bill includes $125 million for state and local pilot programs to test a national VMT fee.
A VMT sounds reasonable, right? After all, every driver imposes costs on roadways. And a mileage tax would capture all drivers, no matter what fuels their cars.
But look more closely, and the VMT tax is perhaps one of the most insidious tax ideas ever devised.
To start, a VMT tax would be incredibly complicated and costly to impose.
The gas tax is simple. A relatively small number of large fuel suppliers pay the tax, the costs of which are then passed on to retailers.
But by definition, a VMT means collecting money directly from hundreds of millions of owners of hundreds of millions of cars. How?
One idea is to force motorists to have their odometers checked regularly, where they’d then be assessed a fee. But that would simply encourage widespread odometer fraud, which is already a problem.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that more than 450,000 cars are sold each year with false odometer readings. You’d also need an army of IRS agents to audit the millions of odometers.
Another option is to use an electronic-toll-style-collection system, which would require every car to come with a transmission device. Still another is to put GPS devices in every car, to track each car’s movement.
But as the Government Accountability Office noted, “launching and operating a system to collect fees from 230 million U.S. passenger vehicles is expected to greatly exceed the current costs of collecting federal fuel taxes.”
That means that a huge portion of the new tax would go to the overhead cost of collecting the tax before a dime could be spent on roads. How much would it cost?
The Congressional Budget Office figures that installing an electronic-toll-type system would cost $56 billion — just to cover the interstates, which account for about 2% of the country’s more than 4 million miles of roads.
The American Transportation Research Institute found that replacing the fuel tax with a VMT tax that uses GPS devices “could result in collection costs of more than $20 billion annually – about 300 times higher than the federal fuel tax.”
Worse, a GPS system would open a Pandora’s box of new government intrusions.
It could, the GAO noted, lead to “variable pricing programs” that “charge drivers different rates based on the type of road or the location of travel.”
But it could also vary the tax based on the kind of car you drive, how you drive, what time of day you drive, or any other behavior the government wants to discourage.
It would, in short, let government bureaucrats “politicize the way we drive by playing favorites,” notes Heritage Foundation researcher David Ditch.
There are also some inconvenient constitutional issues with a mandatory federal GPS tax collection scheme.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 against a federal GPS tracking program, saying that it amounted to an unreasonable search and seizure of evidence.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that a VMT would almost certainly be added on top of the gas tax, not as a replacement. Climate alarmists view the gas tax as a sin tax and will never let it go.
If this monstrosity comes into being — and drivers should do everything they can to make sure it doesn’t — you can thank all those preening electric car owners for foisting it on the rest of us.
Read more at Issues & Insights
There is a simple and fair way to tax electric vehicles for the cost of using the roads. The batteries have a limited life. View the battery as the equivalent of a certain amount of gas which would vary depending on the type of battery and vehicle. Then tax the battery on a per month basis according to a depreciation of the gasoline equivalent. If an owner doesn’t drive much they could request that the depreciation be applied over a longer period of time.
This is fair and could be easily implemented but liberals will never go for it. This plan fails to apply a mileage tax to fossil fuel vehicles so they would not be taxed twice or in the case of some states three times for the driving. There would be no cohesion for where, when someone drives or the type of vehicle. There is no means to monitor where someone drives to see if it is politically correct.
Batteries last longer than you think, and the person who owns the car for the first term would just sell it to avoid the taxes tied to battery replacement. So then there would be tax clauses for when the vehicle changes hands, tied to the odometer, which will be subject to odometer fraud.
Going totally 100% EV over a totally fake crisis is not going to make things better maybe worse but not better
A mileage tax is a dream come true for the self appointed elites who want to control the rest of us. It is a nightmare for everyone else. Applying political correctness the actual driving and the type of car is only one abuse we could expect. What about higher charges for going to gun shows or racing events? What about using where someone drives, such as to a gun show or shooting ranges to put people on a watch list?
Depending on how it is done, GPS tracking might also be subject to being disabled. It might be possible to put aluminum foil around the device for a few days a week.
And they will also be able to track your movement when you charge your EV at a public charging station because none that I’ve seen allows a cash payment.
One of the three reasons for starting the global warming movement was an excuse for new taxes. Right now the gasoline taxes that electric vehicles are not paying are just an excuse. Nation wide only 1% of the cars on the road are EV’s. Here in Washington State it is 3%. Electric vehicles are NOT a big reason for the growing shortfall for roadway construction and maintenance. A more reasonable explanation of the higher cost is inflation. That is being driven by printing money to cover excessive federal government spending, and the higher cost of energy due to taking action on climate change.
In Washington State we are already paying an extra tax on gasoline that was justified by the climate change movement. After voters twice rejected a carbon dioxide emissions tax in general elections, last term the state legislator passed a tax where companies had to buy emission credits. The cost of gas in this state has gone up dramatically since then. If we also had a mileage tax, we would triple taxed on our driving.
“If you walk we’ll tax your feet” , from “Tax man” , the Beatles.
I’m all for charging by the mile. But only for EV owners. Leave the rest of us alone.