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NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel
mdsolar writes "The News and Observer reports on an Charlotte, NC driver who has been fined $1000 for not paying a fuel tax when he fills his tank with vegetable oil. Perhaps the funniest quote is this one: '"With the high cost of fuel right now, the department does recognize that a lot of people are looking for relief," said Reggie Little, assistant director of the motor fuel taxes division. "We're not here to hurt the small guy, we're just trying to make sure that the playing field is level."' Sure, since the field is so plainly tilted against Arab oil interests."
Regardless of whether the law is against him or not, the very fact the state is going to fine him is going to be bad press for the state itself.
Does anyone else get hungry when they smell biodiesel exhaust? Reminds me of McDonald's.
Nerds everywhere must squeegy their foreheads and use the oil harvested there-in to power their Pinto's!
Damn Yankees.
Like a woman scorned?
HARDLY.
That pales in comparison with the fury of a government that isn't getting it's "cut".
We truly lost our freedoms when it became accepted that the government has an inalienable right to a "cut" of ALL transactions!
Corporatism != Free Market
It's fair enough really. The tax is for road usage, not petrol usage. The bowser is just the fairest place to take it. That's why farmers get to use a "special" coloured diesel that has less tax on it.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Since when has any fuel tax collected gone towards Arab oil interests?
Sesostris III
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
with NC's constitution... but since when is it the government's responsibility to make sure the playing field is 'level' - at least in this situation?
Hopefully they will lose the point in legislature and put the investigators on the unemployment line. Just another version of cops with bad attitudes and power trips.
That most states use some or all of the fuel taxes to help defray the cost of road improvements / maintenance (no one said they do a *good* job of this) Someone who is "home-brewing" fuel, whether it be bio-diesel, ethanol, or used cooking oil, ends up essentially using the roads for "free" as they don't pay the fuel tax.
I few options might be to allow home-fuelers to purchase a license (cheap), and be expected to pay more on the yearly state taxes. The license would allow the state to put the tax payment on the honor system (sort of like Michigans' expectation that people will report how much stuff they bought over the internet, and pay the appropriate state taxes on it), with some sort of check. Perhaps a random checking of X percent of the licensees state tax return, and go after the people who didn't pony up. Even go so far as to keep it (relatively) friendly, offer them the chance to pay the extra, no penalty, no crime, if they pay, subject dropped, if not, get mean. By keeping it friendly, there would be the hope of more people switching, get enough people using home-fueling, and then you can start selling licenses for fuel stations, providing alternative fuel(s), and charging the state fuel tax per-gallon, and phase out the licenses at that time.
While I don't know about the laws here in Michigan regarding this sort of thing, I know they've been floating the idea of doing away with the gas tax, and instead raising the sales tax. The thinking being that this would get visitors from out-state paying a bit more, so even if they don't fill up, they're still paying (some) towards the roads they drive on...
Do you see the FNORDS? I refuse to post anonymously, as I am fireproof!
I thought harassing alternative fuel pioneers was ridiculous when it happened in the UK, and railed against it. Now it is happening in the US too. Oil companies own us like dealers own their junkies. It sucks.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
With its 29.9-cent a gallon gas tax, the state collects $1.2 billion each year to pay for road construction.
BULLSHIT! There is NO WAY they spend that much on construction or maintenance in a year!
People we are getting robbed blind here and punished anytime we try to make a decision for ourselves.
For the love of god: RON PAUL 2008 !!!!
ok, media today, we all know, is sensational. They leave out details that would make everything less bad-looking, and stretch details that make things look worse.
Looking at this, I have to assume such is occuring. Perhaps he's supposed to...no, that doesn't make sense. Maybe he...no, not that either.
Ok, I give. What am I missing? How in the heck does this actually make sense? I'm generally the one laughing at the conspiracy nuts, and explaining what the news left off that shows that BigBrother isn't actually hell-bent on making your life, specifically, a living hell. You're not so important that it's worth it to go out of the way to monitor every move you make, every call, every email, every purchase, to the nth degree.
All that withstanding, what the heck? Where's the hole I'm missing?
NC has a 20.2 cpg subsidy for B20 http://www.globalsubsidies.org/IMG/pdf/biofuels_su bsidies_us.pdf which he is not getting since he is buying his oil at the store. Since he is basically using B100, the state
should be paying him 5*20.2-29.9(use tax)=71.1 cpg. So, fining him for this seems about as funny as it gets.s -selling-solar.html
--
No Joke! Rent solar power and fix your electric rates for 25 years: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
so when you pay your car rego it's just your gift to the government is it? that's the fee you pay to use the road. are they going to that busting people using fuel efficent or electric for tax evasion next? " you there sir, why aren't you driving a v8 urban tank, your avoiding fuel taxaren't you!?"
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This pisses me off to no amount. I actually had been planning to convert an old diesel VW to a "grease car", which actually runs off of unmodified vegetable oil, not bio diesel. So which makes me think, using the states logic, if all electric vehicle owners will be fined in the future? What about bicycle riders who use the roads? Maybe we should have a tiered tax based on mileage. High mileage cars pay higher rates...
C'mon, you could at least mention that the gas tax is really an indirect tax on road use. You might even point out that the fine is intended to offset his use of the NC road system and has absolutely nothing to do with how he fuels his car.
Do we want to subsidize motorists who use alternate fuels by exempting them from the taxes on road use? Maybe, maybe not. But they're not exempt yet, so this guy has to pay his fair share. Not that surprisingly, really.
The tax is for road usage, not petrol usage.
This is true but charging the biodiesel user hardly "levels the playing field" and the punishment is silly. Big oil people have far greater resources for figuring taxes owed and paying them. If the state wanted to be fair, they could have figured the taxes for him and demanded payment. Slapping him with a fine in excess of what's owed is only something that should be done if he used the kind of scam accounting big oil companies use.
Something stinks and it's not biodiesel.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No, it's not the fairest place. How about tolls?
Reduce the price of fuel and charge more in road tolls. Now you don't have to worry about discouraging people from using biofuels.
+++ATH0
I mean in the general case, not this particular one, how are they going to ever know that someone is running their diesel fuel car with used vegetable oil?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Algae is your friend.
+++ATH0
When you buy biodeisel made with vegetable oil or corn in the form of ethanol you are ripping off tax payers. These jackasses are just making food more expensive.
The only viable long term solution is wind, solar and tide power. The other alternative energy forms require more inputs than they produce outputs and cannot exist without huge government subsidies.
... that he ever filled up his RV in North Carolina?
I thought criminal matters in the US put the onus on the government to prove that a crime took place, in this case that he had ever purchased biodiseal in North Carolina.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
wtf is this tagged "humor"?
It's obviously not a joke, and it's certainly not funny that people who are actually trying to make a difference are getting donkey punched by the local authorities.
but for some reason the link didn't work. Maybe I forgot to close a tag.
But algae is still your friend.
+++ATH0
I wonder what the gov'ment will do when people with electric cars who charge off of solar start showing up. Do they tax us for being green just because we are using the roads? Do we get punished like this guy? It seems the whole road tax system is going to have to be revamped in the coming years.
If the government was serious about finding minimizing our dependency on foreign oil then this man would be exempt as he does not use foreign oil. Let's get all non-foreign oil sources (including domestic sources, if at all feasible, I'm not sure if it is) exempt from these taxes, and raise the taxes elsewhere. That way more and more people will avoid foreign oil. Then once we've achieved 0 use of foreign oil, we can start slowly putting those taxes back on, while raising the foreign oil taxes even further and lower the taxes elsewhere (wherever it was increased to make up for the loss of tax from the exemption in the first place) so it will continue to remain profitable to use domestic sources. Then, if its still an issue which I think it will be, we can repeat the entire process with more environmentally friendly fuel methods.
Or we can keep invading countries and enrichen US companies that import foreign oil.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
It looks like the fuel is tax exempt in any case: http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/progs/view_ind.cgi ?afdc/5664/0. So, the tax guys didn't know their own law! OMG PONIES LOL!!!!!
s -selling-solar.html
--
If you don't pay tax to rent a generator, then don't pay tax for electricity (no fuel so no tax): http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
That's a cheap shot at Arabs. And untrue. Did you know that the top 2 sources of crude oil are Canada and Mexico? Followed by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela? 3 of the top 4 sources of oil are non-Arab.
So what? The people will move out of the state because of it? Someone who has a good job, children in school and family members will decide to move because the state fined someone $2k for using unauthorized fuel? What else would happen, the state will be ranked last on 'environment friendly states' list? In other words, the state is not the same as a company, a state's bad image is harder to link to immediate loss of profits.
Who the hell tagged this article "humor"? "fuckingsad" would be more appropriate. We should be encouraging people who dabble in alternate fuel sources, not punishing them.
You know this wouldn't have to happen if we ran the government ourselves.
http://www.metagovernment.org/
Time to get really nervous if you have to push your car...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
to see that the spirit of independence, innovation and entrepreneurship still runs strong in the heart of this great country.
A modern day witchhunt.
When you buy biodeisel made with vegetable oil or corn in the form of ethanol you are ripping off tax payers. These jackasses are just making food more expensive.
Hey wait a minute. This is the same government that pays farmers subsidies NOT to plant?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I never understood why people need to show off how they tweaked their cars. The "ricers" put fart-cans on their exhaust which doesn't increase HP, but rather annoys the hell out of everyone. And it's also a homing beacon saying "hey cops, come ticket me for my illegal mods." The same goes for this guy. His car runs on bio-diesel. Great for him (really). However, waving it in front of the cops or anyone else is just asking for at least an inspection by the cops. That's why I do stealth mods to my car. The exhaust sounds the same, there are no flashy stickers or huge spoilers hanging off my trunk. But underneath the hood, I've upped the HP and put on a better exhaust. I don't put on any bumper stickers or pro/college teams logos on my car because the opposing fans might scratch it.
Sadly, in this day and age, the concept of "freedom of speech" is nothing more than "hey officer, I'm suspicious - come investigate me." So I just STFU & GBTW.
So you're essentially saying other people should never buy stuff because increasing demand raises the prices and pisses you off.
Why not do away with the fuel tax & charge a mileage tax if the taxes are used to maintain the roads ?
Charging people to make their own fuel seems silly.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
North Carolina has 78,000 miles of roads, the most of any state.
Which means an average of less than $16,000 per road mile for maintenance AND new construction.
Sounds about right.
Mr Fusion, you're not welcome in North Carolina!
Alright, I admit I'm a nerd.
Now, I'm using my very own naturally produced bio-fuel to power my pinto's what?
The fact that they were randomly checking RVs for non taxable Diesel fuel? I can see them doing it in commercial trucks that have a lower expectation of privacy, but checking RVs for dyed fuel seems over the top. Is this not an unreasonable search and seizure violation?
isn't this treason what the state is doing? No really. Prez Bush said that we are addicted to oil and this kinda flies in the face of it. I mean, doesn't seeking alternatives usually mean investing in alternative energy and encouraging citizens to use it? Or is it only as long as it's oil driven. Heck, we give hybrids a tax refund, not these guys who are actually making a difference.
import system.cool.Sig;
But I'd like a cite, I think.
You're absolutely right. I wish I had mod points, and I wish my friends list weren't limited to 200 names -- you deserve a spot.
Americans have become so used to their loss of freedoms in day-to-day life, they forget how absolutely invasive and totalitarian their government has become. Want to be innovative with your fuel or save a little money? Big Brother didn't get his cut, so here's a fine for $2000, and if you do it again, we'll toss you in jail as a threat to "society". It's just like the mafia telling the new business owner on the block that he needs to pay a hefty protection fee like his neighbours do, and it would be a shame if someone burnt down his shop otherwise.
The sad thing is, I fully expect to see many misguided Slashdotters stand up for the state here and defend this ridiculous fine.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Why not ust remove the gas tax entirely and instead raise the cost of vehicle registration? While not doing anything to push people towards alternative fuel sources, it does stop ridiculous things like this from happening. It would certainly make things easier as people begin using a plethora of different methods to power their vehicles. Making people see that increased cost once a year instead of every time they visit the pump will probably make them feel better about it, too. They may not be getting any money from out-of-state vehicles passing through, but you have to figure that just as many vehicles that are registered in that state have gone somewhere else, so it evens out.
For those of you wondering why this is even news, refer to the following quote from TFA:
;)
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
Apparently, the inspectors were looking for people with diesel-engined RV's that may have had dyed diesel fuel (which is not taxed, or taxed at a lower rate than automotive diesel, and is generally used in farm vehicles) in their tanks. They may have also been checking for the use of Low Sulfur Diesel, which is illegal for use in MY2007 diesel engines (which require Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel).
The race mentioned appears to have been a NASCAR event, which makes you wonder why state inspectors might think that farm diesel might end up in road vehicles there...
I myself didn't know that there *was* such a thing as "illegal diesel fuel" until I read this article.
OTOH, this is a ridiculous case that ought to be throw out of court. Just another case of overzealous law enforcement officials tossing their weight around.
When those other sources are cut off, it will suddenly become available. Until then, we'll use the oil from elsewhere...
Assuming that there's no wholesale price for used frying oil, and that you use 10 gallons in a week, your bond is $6,000 and your tax bill is $7,839, giving you a total cost of $13,839
All things considered, he got off lightly. He could have been ordered to pay the full costs outlined above (although probably at the wholesale price of cooking oil), plus fines for non-payment of the various bonds, plus a fine for non-payment of taxes.
Do I agree with these kinds of charges? No friggin' way! You want to talk about encouraging innovation, well innovate THIS, North Carolina - there will be no Hewletts or Packards or Jobs or Wosniks in a place that makes any kind of innovation totally unaffordable. If the best a startup can afford is a garage, what is the point in charging them in taxation more than everything they posses combined? It's a great way to kill the real doers in the world.
The same goes for any other State that inflicts taxes greater than the value of that which is being taxed, and doubly goes for Britain where common law and common sense are supposed to take precedence over civil and criminal law. (That fact has been used many times in appeals, and is probably the only notable achievement British justice has, but it's probably one of the greatest achievements of any legal system.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It might be that gasoline taxes also pays for some roads, I don't know, but in any case the taxes on those are higher than on environmental friendly fuel just because the government want to make the environmental fuel an easier choice, and I like ideas like that.
;D
If this guy uses vegetable oil because it's cheaper when wtf is the problem!? I thought the problem with environmental friendly fuel was that they where more expensive than oilbased ones, but if they aren't why stop people from using them?
I'm quite sure the taxes on gasoline in the USA can't be that much? Over here 1 litre of 95 octane gasoline cost around 12 sek, often more.
12 Swedish kronor = 1.71492 U.S. dollars
You don't pay that do you? Because if you did I guess you would have more fuel efficient cars
I, for one, prefer vinegar for fuel ;)
Repeat after me: Vinegar, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar!
Next /. headline, "NC Man charged fuel tax for pushing car through a drive-thru."
Time to get really nervous if you have to push your car...
What if it's solar-powered, will they tax the Sun?
Table-ized A.I.
Back when I lived in New Jersey, I had oil heat, and if I'd forgotten to check the oiltank dipstick in a while and ran out of oil at night, I could get a can of diesel at the gas station to restart my furnace until the oil people could get there. It was really convenient.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So, I wonder what they'll do if you drive an all electric vehicle. It doesn't use fuel.
Anyway, the moral of the story is twofold: No good deed goes unpunished. Don't tell advertise you are using biofuels.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The idiots intent on taxing Bob Texeira, even after acknowledging the stupidity of it, need a refresher course in the intent and purpose of a GASOLINE tax. The tax is (or should) exist to defray the state and societal costs associated with our use of that specific fuel... it should have nothing to do with road construction or maintenance. That is what VEHICLE registration fees and drivers' licenses should be funding. Hmmm, I wonder where *that* money is going? If indeed registration fees are being used properly but there's not enough, then those fees should be increased instead of using another tax for something it shouldn't be used for. Bookkeeping problem or porking, you decide.
NC has some of the highest gasoline/diesel prices in the southeast due to state taxes. Fuel in Virginia, for example, is often 20 cents per gallon cheaper.
So imagine you're a long-haul trucker, traveling thousands of miles on one trip. What do you do? You buy fuel where's cheap, filling both 100-gallon tanks to the top. IOW, you don't buy gas in states where it's expensive, you just drive straight through. What does the state of NC call this? Yep, you guessed it: "fuel tax evasion!" That's right. They even have checkpoints set up on the highways to measure the amount of fuel in a big rig's tanks and THEY FINE THE TRUCKER FOR THE TAXES HE WOULD HAVE PAID if he were stupid enough to buy NC's overpriced fuel.
By the way, everyone was outraged about "Big Oil's OBSCENE profits" last year. Get this: Exxon makes about $0.06 profit per each gallon of gasoline sold. That's after discovery, drilling, transport, refining, and delivery to retail. The State of NC takes 10X that much (about $.57 per gallon) for doing nothing.
If you think the US governement is making a lot of money by taxing fuel, come and visit europe, that 'll make you laugh.
Taxes are not about constructing roads any more, here they are necessary because you are emitting CO2 these days.
So stop breathing or you'll be fined next time they run a check on you.
I'm reminded of this quip from my fortunes file:
"We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem--how to run a sunbeam through a meter."
My dad used to work for the town's highway department. It costs about $100,000 to pave 1 mile of road. There are 93 miles of road in my town which would have a cost of $9,300,000 just to pave. There are about 5100 people old enough to drive. Over the life of the road, each driver would have to pay $1824 to pay for their construction. Roads last about 20 years (give or take depending on how heavily they are used, what types of vehicles are on them, etc). That means each person would have to pay $91 a year in registration fees just to create the roads in the first place. The maximum yearly fee for a passenger vehicle is $56 and for a commercial vehicle its $104. Also note that pickups are generally registered as commercial vehicles which have a lower registration fee than passenger vehicles (my truck at MGVW 4400 pounds is $26 vs $32.25 for a passenger plate).
Now... that is just for the initial paving of the road. It doesn't take into account the cost of resurfacing, sealing, fixing potholes, plowing and sanding, construction of bridges, sluice and drainage, maintenance of shoulders, picking up carcasses and other debris such as fallen trees, signs, lighting, etc. Highway maintenance is the single largest expense coming out of the town budget (the school being funded through its own budget and water/sewer being funded from direct billing like a utility. Fire/EMS is the second most expensive (cheaper because the firemen are volunteers instead of being paid). Police are provided by the county via county taxes).
If you think vehicle registration alone (at least in NY) pays for construction and upkeep of roads, you are very, very sorely mistaken. Take out of my $26 the cost to manufacture plates (lets say $3), the 15 minutes I spent with a DMV employee (easilly over $30/hr by the time you factor in wages, employer tax contributions, pension and benefits), and paperwork and computer/network maintenance ($1) and we're left with about $11.50 of my truck registration going to my town's needing over $200 per person to construct and maintain roads. Throw in my trailer and camper ($17.50 each) and my ATV ($10) and we're still only ending up with me giving them a total of $71 before processing costs... and a lot (most?) people don't have anything more than their vehicle to register. The remainder is made up between a combination of fuel taxes, property taxes, general sales taxes, toll money collected by the state, federal highway monies, etc.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
But if you push your car, you are not paying fuel tax either, so you will be fined. Without knowing the exact letter of the law, it sounds rather ridiculous. Why pay tax on not taxable fuel? What about electric cars? They don't pay tax. How about one of these experimental hydrogen powered cars? It seems pretty ludicrous to me.
Hey wait a minute. This is the same government that pays farmers subsidies NOT to plant?
Also the same government that gives very hefty subsidies to the oil companies...
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Its ok, they already tax the Taco Bell Bean Burrito
I, for one, welcome our idiotic tax-happy overlords!
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted SlashDot personality, I can be quite helpful in rounding up tax evaders to toil in their underground slush funds.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The same way they tax the oilcompanies or dinosaurs when you fill your car with gas...?
While not exactly legal over here in Germany either, many people run their Diesel cars on a mix of commercial grade diesel and vegetable oil, which comes even often used from fast food outlets if you can believe it.
;-)
It's quite easy to spot (or smell, rather) these cars when following them as you develop a sudden hunger for french fries out of the blue!
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
...it says "Don't tread on me."
There are a few gas stations near me that sell actual biodiesel.. presumably that's properly taxed.
I imagine he's being hit by the same kind of statute that would stop you using red or farm diesel in your car.
Tax Maaaaaaannnnnn! If you walk, I'll tax your feet.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I also suspect this is the same in most countries in the world. Currently, you cannot use vegetable oil in your car legally. But I'm sure our wise legistrators will come up a way to pay taxes on those, too.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
In July the law is changing over here, so that people producing biodiesel for their own use (and less than some ridiculously huge amount, like 2500 litres) will be exempt from paying fuel duty on it.
Breaking stupid laws works, people. The sooner the US population wakes up to this idea, the better.
Since fuel has a voluntary tax attached to fuel, you can choose to not buy any. This man cannot legally be fined since he chooses a fuel not already taxed.
So...How much of a fine does an Electric Car get? They do not use any Gas or consumeables, But still drive the road. Will the state charge every home owner a surcharge just to cover their costs (like the record companys do)?
And just how will NC handle that problem?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
In all fairness, it would probably be a much wiser decision to do taxes on the vehicle and eliminate fuel taxes altogether. Then we could really make taxation progressive by taxing the percentage of the vehicle's value to bring in the necessary revenue.
In my state, we have fuel taxes and taxes on vehicles. Of course, the taxes on vehicles are more or less flat, so a vehicle worth $50k will pay the same tax as a vehicle worth $7k.
...where "money" comes from you don't understand? We have what is called a "fiat currency", meaning it is created by fiat, by order, not from producing anything and not based on anything but force of arms. The government prints it up out of thin air, or rather a private bank-one you can't buy into-gets to print it up, just data entry it into existence, then LOAN it to the government and to other banks, where it enters circulation. There is NO need for governmental taxation on anything except as a STICK to whack people with for dubious social engineering purposes, and the government is a pretty stupid and unfair bully judging by past track record. Every time you say you are in favor of a tax with this sort of currency system, it's the same as saying you think sticking a gun in someone's ear is "fair" to get them to do what you want them to do. The government could fund everything they do now directly without any sort of tax system, and could eliminate all this coercive BS they pull on people.
Educate thyself, go back and read the history of US money, banks, the creation of the "federal" reserve, etc. It is the longest running biggest economic conjob ever in the history of the world.
Novozymes, one of the world largest producers of enzymes for bio-fuel, has their U.S. production in Franklinton, North Carolina. Looks like they are shooting themselves in the foot in more ways then one...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear
Singapore takes a similar approach, however, it is also easier to get by without a car in city-state. American cities could probably benefit from the congestion tax implemented in London, which applies to cars in the city during business hours; I know that NYC is looking into this. One major problem with taxing either gas or cars is that it is a regressive tax. Besides, it doesn't matter just how fuel efficient or expensive a car is, what matters is the emissions created during its use (and production). A carbon tax addresses these issues, because it is intended to be a revenue neutral tax, in which the money that is collected from corporations selling energy of fuels to consumers is returned when consumers file for taxes. This way, individuals can make their own short-term (driving habits) and long-term (car purchases) based on the premise that they can save by cutting down on their carbon emissions. http://www.carbontax.org/ By the way, you can't "really make taxation progressive by taxing the percentage of the vehicle's value to bring in the necessary revenue," because that's the same principal as sales tax which is the primary example of a regressive tax.
Sshhh.... keep quiet, else the neocons and McCains' would hear you and invade Venezuela...and make another iraq out of it?
Do you want to be drafted and sent to 'zeula to sweat in the 100'F strumming guitar and wearing a 100 pound uniform, while being afraid when your time's up????
Don't give our watch-losing-moron-prez any more ideas. Got it?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...And you just posted this on slashdot.
Congratulations, you win the 2007 irony award.
Great Intellect...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you want to sit I'll tax your seat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet...
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
NO! You are assuming that fairness is that the rich pay more than the poor. That is not true! Fairness would state that the person who uses the roads the most would pay the most in taxes. No if ands or buts about it. Personally, I feel that gas taxes are one of the fairest taxes the government imposes, as it's an actual usage tax. If you use the infrastructure more, you pay more in taxes. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage. The tax would more accurately go against the weight of the car and the number of miles driven, as those two factors have more to do with how much wear and tear you cause on the states infrastructure.
As far as taxes on vehicles go, it makes sense to tax them the same, at least if the tax is earmarked to pay for the states roads. If anything, it's more likely that a car that costs $50k causes less damage to the roads than the old clunker that cost $500. I kind of wish gas taxes were higher. I imagine for something like gas with supply constrained at a relatively constant amount at any given time, the impact of the tax would hit the oil companies more than it would hit the average consumers. It would slightly reduce the available supply, but that's also not necessarily bad. This story is just garbage. The guy was evading taxes (even if he didn't realize it), and must pay the price. End of story.
Phil
To those who say it's just an extension of road tax: it certainly isn't in the UK. Cooking oil is classified as a food and is therefore exempt from VAT (Value Added Tax - our flat rate for almost everything). When it's used in a car, Revenue, Customs and Excise have now decided that it should be subject to VAT and Fuel Duty, making it about 20p per litre cheaper than diesel. I suppose that isn't whole point, as the 'green' aspects are still there, but as usual the government runs to take its bit without any consideration or encouragement for change.
Actually, if it's in the USA, probably on the whole the farmer got subsidized, not paid taxes.
So while "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" is emotional and all, the question is also whether said government wants to subsidize cars. Helping farms stay afloat is one thing. (Because food prices won't go higher without those subsidies, and you'd just bankrupt most farmers, like happened in the Great Depression.) But subsidizing fuel is entirely a different question. If the farmer and factory making that oil had went for biodiesel insteast, chances are they _wouldn't_ have been subsidized at all.
Also, before someone jumps in to wave the banner of subsidizing local fuel against those "evil" arabs... well, consider this: taxes don't go into some black hole, and subsidy money don't come out of nowhere. If you want the government to subsidize fuel, it will have to tax someone for that money.
So in effect it would end up taxing the guys with small cars or no cars, to give some money back to the guys with SUVs, sports cars and trucks. That's the way it tends to work: you take from everyone and subsidize equally per pound/gallon/whatever. So whoever consumes more, is effectively getting some money from someone else. Is that more fair? Hardly.
For that matter even the "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" rhetoric is missing the same point: tax money don't go into some black hole, or in the king's bank account, but come back as (A) services provided by the state, and (B) extra aggregate demand which creates employment and keeps the economy going. (Look up Keynesian Economics some day.) So without A you wouldn't have schools, roads and police stations, and without B you probably would have a lot higher unemployment and lower wages. If you want to keep your standard of living (including that you have a highway to commute on, instead of taking the freakin' train), that money has to come from _somewhere_.
Dropping taxes on this, pretty much means they have to get that money from somewhere else. Either they fuck up the industry with more taxes (which actually would yield pretty little and cause more industry to move offshore, plus it messes with the keynesian multiplier in a bad way), or they fuck up the commerce (and it's actually you who get indirectly taxed, because you get higher prices), or they tax you some more.
So in effect, again, less taxes on fuel means that the guys with the bigger cars get the biggest break, and the guys with smaller cars or no cars might actually pay more in some other kind of tax. I'd be hard pressed to see that as an improvement. Even skipping past the "fairness" of giving a break to the guys who had more money in the first place, the message is, "get a bigger gas guzzler and pollute the planet more."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The tax that is applied to gas is NOT a fuel tax, it's a road tax. If you use the fuel off-road, such as on a farm or in an ATV, you don't have to pay that tax on the gasoline. Vegetable oil cars STILL CAUSE WEAR ON THE ROADWAY, as eco-friendly and economical as they may be.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So with your logic, someone that figures out how to use water, to make hydrogen, should be really quiet, or they might just disappear completely. How is this a good thing?
It's a little different in Australia.
:/ Of course, as with most places, that money doesn't go into the main roads.
I drive around 15-20,000 kms a year. That's slightly higher than average, let's say 10k kms/yr is average. At 10 kms/L that's 1000 litres of petrol per year. At current prices that's around AU$1300 per year, of which AU$390 is fuel excise and $130 is GST. So I'm paying AU$520/year in fuel tax alone - add to that the $400 or so I pay for rego and we're an order of magnitude higher than the required figures you give.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I'm thinking more of having a vehicle tax where perhaps the first $10k is exempt. Take the blue book value, subtract $10k, then tax the remaining at a percentage each year.
The thing is, if we don't make the tax progressive like this, the poor cannot necessarily get around, and as such, the economy is going to take a hit. Sometimes things have to be "unfair" to be "fair".
I am not talking about heavily taxing the rich. I am not talking about heavily taxing the poor. I am talking about a compromise.
Fuel taxes very fairly penalise cars with poor fuel economy.
American cars are notoriously bad for that.
I was driving a large Renault scenic this weekend (I hire a car every weekend as I live in the UK but work in the Netherlands) diesel and it was averaging 46 to the gallon, I'm not exactly an economical driver, I do 90 on the motorway when its clear and prefer to accelerate fast rather than steadily and I still got that economy. (ok thats a uk gallon, the us gallon is a little smaller but not by that much)
So if you want to pay less in fuel and in fuel tax then get a more economical car - I've driven a yaris that managed about 60 to the gallon. If you can afford to drive a big expensive oversized hulk of metal then you can afford to pay more tax through your fuel
(and personally I count myself in the middle, I like big executive cars, I'm 6'2 and small cars don't fit me too well, but I dislike SUVs, oversized and unnecessary in the UK - except something like a land rover defender - if you are driving one of those then you probably need it - I used to when I lived in the middle of the new forest - other cars can't exactly drag trees out of the road when they fall in high winds)
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Imagine if your government made lots of money from advertising. Time-shifting devices would be tax-avoidance devices, and they'd be outlawed faster than you could say "budget gap."
Madness, pure madness.
Currently, people making and using their own biofuels in the UK have to register and pay fuel tax, but this is about to change. The government has agreed a new limit of 2500 litres per annum below which there will be no need to register or pay tax.
As always, one is amazed to see a sensible suggestion from government!
How long until they start fining the unemployed for the income tax revenue they fail to produce by steadfast laziness, or prosecuting anorexic persons for avoiding taxes on food, snacks, or beverages by not eating?
If this shmoe got his car to run on veggie oil, maybe instead of fining him, they should hire him, maybe, just maybe, he's onto something.
~hal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_taxation
"..., but, damn, wow, you're right, we really bent him over good on this one! Good work people!"
Here in Hungary many people fill their cars with used cooking oil. This is not only illegal, but also highly polluting and carcinogenic. These vehicles are easy to recognize because of their thick, odd-coloured and very smelly exhaust smoke. I have called the police on several occasions to report the licence plate number of such cars, I do it whenever I see them. I even saw them being stopped and fined twice.
On the other hand what they do is also tax cheating. Here in Hungary a big part of the price (over 50%) for legally sold fuel is tax, for the purpose of maintaining and extending the road network and financing the traffic related branches of police. A smaller part is diverted to finance public transport network expansions, so that ever growing motorism can be reduced somewhat for the benefit of natural environment and quality of life. Most other countries of the world have similar burdens built into the price of fuel.
All in all, if you use untaxed used vegetable oil to power your vehicle, you are both hurting other's health and cheating on taxes. You should note that the cornerstone of US Constitution is also the simple sentence: the government has authority to collect taxes. If you try to avoid that, you should be in prison. Without taxation, nations couldn't exist and there would be anarchy. Anarchists are enemies of the mankind said Teddy Roosevelt and he was so right!
My Car is Powered By Clean! Atomic! Energy!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
do you have to pay fuel tax on whatever you had for breakfast?
Not all oil sources are Arab, especially not all Middle Eastern sources.
I think this is the reason why alternate fuels aren't more popular. It's that in order to use them you have to pay a tax, and there is no system to pay that tax. Thus, it is illegal to use that fuel. Also, when thse fuels are taxed, I'm sure they'll be taxed heavily just so Big Oil can make up their profits they'll be losing on people not using gas.
For the people that are like "well the money has to come from somewhere" that's what state income tax and sales tax is for, to pay for public spaces.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This is nothing new. Fuel for use in vehincles on farms does not have road tax applied to it. If you drive on public roads using that fuel you will be fined if caught. This is just special pleadiing that since it's vegetable based fuel he shouldn't have to pay road tax. Wrong. He gets to pay road tax just like the rest of us, or don't use that fuel on public roads.
This is completely ridiculous, I know in Ontario, Canada, i don't pay two of the taxes on my biodiesel, i believe they exempt it to encourage more people to start using it. I can't believe a government will go after one of it's own citizens for trying to help the earth, bad publicity indeed.
In the UK it's called 'red diesel' due to the dye they put in it. Basic deal is that all fuel is taxed, but red diesel is taxed at a much much lower rate. This is intended to help sectors the government feel need preferential treatment, such as for farm machinery.
/litre (about 8 US dollars / US gallon)*. Unleaded petrol (gasoline) is about the same, yes, in the UK, fuel is about 8 US dollars to the US gallon.
;-)
Verrryyyyy approximately, red diesel is about 50p/ litre (about 4 US dollars / US gallon) and normal diesel is about just under one pound
so that's 100% price difference. I am guessing you folks in the USA have a similar system, is the price difference the same kind of scale? You can understand that inspectors get very upset if they find you're running red diesel in a road car.... serious fines for sure.
They are jumping on people running biofuels here as well, people have worked out you can run a diesel car with a high percentage of cooking oil, and despite car manufacturers saying this invalidates your warranty, your car will break down, your daughter will run away with somebody from the circus and your chickens will stop laying eggs, quite clearly a lot of people are doing just fine and word is spreading, tax inspectors are trying to work out what to do about it here.
*For the pedantic, one website I checked says diesel is 95.7p a litre and another site says one pound sterling is 1.9689 dollars, and one litre = 0.26 US gallons so we'll go for one pound/one pound=2 dollars/4 litres to the gallon/ in the maths, eh? but feel free to work out a precise figure, I think it's an ok generalisation...
And, without the taxes to support the infrastructure and thereby subsidize the cost, alternative sources cost more than conventional energy sources. Double-whammy.
The presenter at one alternative energy presentation I went to pointed out the subsidies in oil go all the way up to the dredging of harbours to admit tankers and the use of the military to secure the supply. It's not just roads the taxes support, it's the whole infrastructure.
>It's called "making people reimburse society for the damage they do".
I wonder if the additional income does anything to reimburse society for the damage done.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Eventually, we are all going to be driving cars that run on something other than gasoline.
/do/ need to be paid for, and today, they are in no small part paid for through gasoline taxes. If that revenue goes away, it's going to have to come from somewhere else.
The state will simply move the taxation to a different point.
If your car runs on hydrogen, they will tax hydrogen.
If your car runs on electricity, they will tax the electricity. Perhaps we will all have special power meters for plugging in our cars at night.
If it becomes too difficult to tax the fuel source, they will simply issue an annual tax based on your odometer reading. Perhaps you will be allowed to pay it in installments over the course of the year.
Government greed for your tax dollars aside, the roads and infrastructure
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
It should be notes that fuel tax accounts for only about one-quarter to to one-third of the budget for maintaining roads (depending on the municipality and type of road). The balance is made up of various local and state taxes (property tax, income tax, etc.).
Cyclists are charged: It's called property tax, sales tax, income tax, etc. Tax on fuel only covers about a quarter to half of the cost of maintaining roads (depending on the municipality in question).
Think of it this way: if the right to the road were based on paying a fuel tax, a Hummer would have more right to the road than a Prius.
Wow, thank you for deciding what fairness is. I had no idea they'd gotten around to giving someone authority to decide that "no ifs ands or buts." But it seems they picked the wrong person. If I had the job, I'd declare fairness states that the person who benefits most from the roads would pay the most in (road) taxes. That's not necessarily the person who uses them most. If two guys drive the same distance to work every day, and one gets paid minimum wage for doing backbreaking labor while the other gets a huge salary for sitting behind a desk, seems perfectly fair to me that the latter contributes more to road upkeep -- the roads are worth a lot more to him.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
Or if you are Fred Flintstone.
Taxation without representation?
The entire problem with what you propose, is that in the USA, 25 mpg is the current fuel economy standard. Good luck finding any car here that gets your 46 mpg average. All of the car manufacturers claim it is too hard or impossible to manufacture 30+ mpg, let alone 40+ mpg vehicles for the USA. Senator Dianne Feinstein has recently submitted a bill that would require 30+ mpg average fuel economy by 2010, and 1 gallon per year after until 2020. She calls shenanigans on all of the car companies that can manufacture cars in Canada, Australia, Europe, Asia and even Africa that get 35 or more mpg, and are making them right now, but claim they can't do it here. She's right.
Also, you aren't even allowed to import any of those aforementioned vehicles into the USA, unless you are immigrating to the USA and already own one. All sorts of taxes, regulations and whatnot to make quite sure of that.
You should try looking up how the Brazilians do it. Sugar cane ethanol. They have trucks, let alone cars, there, that have been recorded at 46-75 mpg. Then read up on why the USA charges an exorbitant import and production tax on cane sugar, and cane sugar ethanol, to the point that you lose money on every drop of that particular flavor of ethanol that you would import or produce domestically, so that a gallon of sugar cane ethanol is more than four times the cost of a gallon of oil-based gasoline. The cost to manufacture, from seed to distilling into ethanol, costs quite a bit less in energy and dollars than it does to even pump a full tank of standard gasoline into the tank of an average SUV (let alone produce it). You'd almost think that the oil companies through their purchased government representatives might have had a say in those import taxes on cane ethanol eh?
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
If a state or city institutes a tax on carbon with the expressed purpose of spending the money neutralizing the taxed emissions it won't take long before the governing body is spending those taxes on other budget items or subsidies for large businesses that have no real benefit for the people paying the "carbon tax".
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
I have one quibble: The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage.
The federal government contributes more or less to each state depending on fed. rules. For example- and I know I am paraphrasing wildly- if a state has millions of residents using SUVs, the fed may contribute less to the state because it is not within fed. guidelines for milage, re, pollution.
--clujo in disguise.
Also, things other then cars run on fuel. These people are also paying for the roads. Gas powered lawn mowers burn on the same fuel. I don't think there are many mowers that are running down streets, especially if they are the walk-behind kind. Generators can run on fuel. These also do not move down the road, so why are they taxed to pay for roads in the same way as fuel used to power a vehicle? It might not be "fair", but it would be smart to tax the cars. The reason is that gas prices have gotten to a point they are pinching people's budgets. They are not pinching the budget of the well-off (and neither would a car tax), they are pinching the lower (and in some cases even the middle) class. How long before people have to decide between gas to get to work, or food to feed themselves or their children? This sort of decision is also bad for the economy when you consider that the "extremely rich" make up such a small percentage of the US population. (Note: I am not a fan of any taxation, but I think that to say a "fuel tax" is fair is BS.) The guy was evading taxes (even if he didn't realize it), and must pay the price. End of story. No, he was avoiding paying what is essentially a collective monopoly (after all there is an oil cartel). These are the same people who adjusted the price of E-85, so it would cost the same as (or close to) regular unleaded fuel. These are companies who are fronts for oil producing countries. These taxes and fines only strengthen their potential monopoly by closing out a free market (not a huge fan of that ideal either). It constrains the abilities of the local consumer to come up with an alternate fuel setup and discourages them from using anything that is auto-fuel. BTW, if he was running a 100% electric car, is he dodging taxes because he is using the roadways but is not paying gas taxes? How is this ANY different?
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
The guy was evading taxes (even if he didn't realize it), and must pay the price. End of story.
Nonsense. If I built a car that runs on pure sunshine, am I evading the tax? No. Their system is broken, because it assumes ALL cars can use only 2 types of fuel, gas or diesel, and they tax the consumption of those to pay for and maintain the road infrastructure (yeah, right).
One of my vehicles is powered by pizza and beer. Am I also guilty for avoiding paying a fuel tax?
Arab oil interests? What a racist assumption! Most oil profits go to the multinational corporations like Shell and ExxonMobil. These are European and American companies.
Don't mistake my information supplied here for approval of stopping trucks to tax them for fuel they might have bought, but North Carolina doesn't take $0.60/gallon for nothing, they take it to support about $200,000,000 worth of road building each year, so you will have a road to run your truck (car, motorcycle) on next year.
Taxes are very seldom taken "for nothing", they are usually recycled into services for those who paid the taxes. Republicans who are against building roads or schools with "my money" frequently leave that part of the tax and spend business that governments conduct out of the equation.
Just saying...
Excise Tax Let's also not forget NC charges and excise tax on your cary every year. So you aren't just taxed once for your car purchase but assuming your car lives 15 years...the state taxes you 15 times!!! That excise tax is NOT your yearly registration fee either.
NC just needs to make a law saying all the money you earn goes right to them be a lot easier.
Actually they're looking at taxing per mile with GPS encoders in your car showing how far you drove.
I believe Oregon has already piloted said program. The problem seems to be as people push for higher per mile return on the fuel it uses their revenues go down. So now they feel they should get a per-mile rate instead of a per-gallon rate.
I'm a bit surprised this was tagged with humor, as it's not really funny and it's really happening to this guy and sets a precedent for other states to come after all of the folks interested in not burning oil products to make their cars move.
I'm sure we'll see some asinine proposals to add taxes to wind power generation/solar generation that is done by individuals to live off-grid or to reduce their consumption because once again with the taxes placed on the electrical usage reducing your usage of it via these methods is stripping the state of it's ability to generate revenue.
Heaven forbid the states actually reduce their output as well. There sure seems to be a lot of waste in government, at least in my experience with seeing the back end of government entities.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Exactly! Bill Gates earns on the order of 10**9 dollars per year. The landscaper who mows his lawn earns on the order of 10**4 dollars. Therefore, being able to work without getting stuck in traffic is worth 10**5 == 100,000 times more in dollars for Mr. Gates, yet he pays the same in highway maintenance tax as his landscaper. Of course it's fair to tax the rich at a higher rate. They derive more monetary benefit from the public infrastructure.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
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You're fucking stupid. It's not big oil; it's Iowa politics. The purpose of the import taxes is to protect farmers' votes, not big oil. The oil companies have no real incentive to have their shareholders jerked around by international politics.
As for the cars, well, compare a large truck in Europe with a large truck in the states. After all of the bullshit, and extra ten tons at 75 miles per hour makes a hell of a big difference. Small cars are not as survivable. Why do the safety improvements come out here first? The same reason the fuel economy improvements come out in Europe first. That's where the market demands them.
Oh, and ethanol, any form, will get a lower mileage since there's less heat energy per gallon of fuel. Take your fucking conspiracy theories and shove them up your ass. Physics and blatantly obvious politics are the cause here, not big oil.
SUV's have this 4WD feature and actually need roads less, but pay more. Ironicironically they often slow down so much to go over RR crossings and barely noticable irregularities of the pavement - they might as well stuff it into granny gear, step out, walk back to my car and slap me in the face before strolling back to their vehicle to catch up as it reaches the other side of the tracks.
Minnesota Public Radio runs a regular (every 3 months or so) chat with former governors. Wendell Anderson (the one on the cover of Time Magazine in the 1970's holding up a big Walleye...or was it a Northern, oh well, you get the idea) and Arne Carlson and maybe they had one other but I can't remember his name.
They both clearly, seriously (and humorously) claimed that writing actual letters (not e-mail) to state legislators or governors had an impact. And if they got 3-5 letters, they assumed that small number of people sufficiently motivated to write and post a letter represented a much larger number of people who felt the same way.
Maybe it's just in Minnesota or in the past, or both, but I doubt it.
2: Inflation isn't equitable. It hits the poorest hardest. The rich can easily move their value to the source of the inflation or to areas which benefit most. That is, the government, government contracts etc and the stock and property markets. The poor on the other hand are largely unable to do so, and in fact are also likely not even to match inflation with pay increases. The result is that larger portions of the economy find their way into fewer hands.
Deleted
Top gear covered this a few months back (or possibly last year... my memory is not... erm... thingy). Actually, the clip I was looking for featured one of the presenters collecting used oil from a chip shop and filling up the car with that. Anyway I found this clip:
top gear article
and then I realised that it wasn't top gear I was thinking of; it was Fifth Gear! But I still can't find the actual article. I can however find a follow-up show with the same presenter:
Fifth gear article!
Since he purchased the vegetable oil in NC, he paid 7.5% sales tax on it. Will they credit him that money?
My 2004 Honda Civic Hybrid gets about 45 mpg average, quite often better. My dealer called the other day, and told me that even with 75k miles on it, he'd still give me $12k in trade on it. Not bad. (I turned him down, by the way; gas in Chicago is $4 a gallon right now...)
I hope the land around you yields, a crop like all the other fields, and then your waiting might make sense...
"Fairness would state that the person who uses the roads the most would pay the most in taxes."
Only when using a simplistic view.
Often one of the reasons that they have to use the roads more is because they are poorer. eg: they can't afford housing closer to work, or work location keeps changing because of short sighted management decisions, requring employment elsewhere.
$57 in pennies, shipped parcel post.
Not sure what's more astonishing - this or how much we used to spend per message and per hour for access back in the day...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If he was not conforming with pollutants emitions laws, maybe the fine would be justified. But having to pay just because you want to use other type of fuel is plain stupid. Why don't you people living in the US do something? We're tired of reading news about how dumb your government can be.
http://derkosak.blogspot.com - That's a blog.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Never underestimate the stupidity of government.
If they tax the Sun, then we shall drive in the Shade...
I live in a jurisdiction that has a car tax, and that's pretty much how it is. We pay a base of like $25 for our tax sticker, plus a tax based on the value. The first $3k is exempt, the first $20k is subsidized at like 70%, and above that is full rate. Last year was 4.4% of the NADA value. My burden was $0.50 plus the sticker :) Some dude I work with, my age but likes to pretend like he's loaded, leased a new car and paid over $1000 and bitched for a couple weeks. That has nothing to do with the tax, but it was funny at the time.
What if it's solar-powered, will they tax the Sun?
It doesn't matter if it is fusion powered, zero point energy, or any other energy source. It matters that the government has to build and keep up roads. If we all had some magic fuel source cars that came from the factory fueled for 1 million miles, we'd still some how have to pay taxes to the local/state governments that are have to build the roads. If we all had nuclear powered cars, we'd end up having to have the D.O.T. stick a GPS Tax monitor on all our vehicles just so we'd know where to send all the tax money to. Or we could just have all public roads become instant toll roads.
Maybe he should have switched to Hydrogen. Everyone loves water. waterpoweredcar.com http://www.fm-soft.de/d18/ google search: Hydrobooster, Joe Cell, Electrolysis, D18 Cell (many more) Yahoo Groups: JoesCell2, joecellfreeenergydevice, Joecellexperimenters, Hydroxy, Hydroxy_Boost, Hydroxy_Research_Group (many more) So much info on how to build the different cells. To get 250mpg+(petrol) with Water/Hydrogen dose sound nice.
Weather damages the road far more than cars do....
Hell, many CA statutes define the present to be past and future, singular to be plural and masculine to be feminine and neuter:Start your heads spinning now...
So because I am better or more efficient at deriving value out of a service/good, I should be punished more than someone who is less efficient or worse at deriving value from the same service/good? Ok....
As long as I am not purposely hurting others, at the end of the day, how I derive that value is really irrelavent.
It isn't a matter of benefit, but rather a personal act of deriving. The former implies the state provides/gives unfairly more value to the rich rather than to the poor (in which case I would agree with you). Which is BS, the state doesn't provide jack. It reallocates while taking its own transaction cost cut and then some. Here, all customers are allocated the same service/good. The later (derives) implies personal action and drive to generate productive value for society from the service/good.
If the poor guy wanted to derive more value from the infrastructure, then he should strive and struggle to do so (getting a higher paying job being just one of many options).
besides, most of the people who will be paying the tax will be the ones least able to afford it; at least here in the northeast US. I have friends whose parents are moving from their house of 25 years, because of the property taxes. Another energy tax(carbon tax), above the already high energy prices, and yes I know federal,state, and local taxes are a huge part of that, would exacerbate an already significant problem.
Now I would support an incentive that encouraged these alternative, cleaner, lower carbon, whatever, fuels; say lowering the energy taxes that already exist on them to encourage the usage. That would be a fine incentive that would have the same effect.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
I fail to understand your comment and what it has to do with /. Not everyone who mods their property do it for show. I'm assuming you mean modding your PC with flashing LEDs, etc. I prefer performance without any flash (literally). Your car, PC, etc. looks just like everyone else's but hidden inside is much better performance.
If two guys drive the same distance to work every day, and one gets paid minimum wage for doing backbreaking labor while the other gets a huge salary for sitting behind a desk, seems perfectly fair to me that the latter contributes more to road upkeep -- the roads are worth a lot more to him.
I'd say the roads would be worth a lot more to the first guy who'd likely be homeless without them.
I had no idea of this prior to reading a bunch of sites concerning biodiesel...that while the government has licensed biodiesel as a 'legal' fuel for an automobile....vegetable oil is not. So they are free to make whatever laws to prohibit use...which are always fines. Blah.
"Raw vegetable oil cannot meet biodiesel fuel specifications, it is not registered with the EPA, and it is not a legal motor fuel." - National Biodiesel Board
I agree with those that have said that this shouldn't matter and people should be allowed to use it. But since it doesn't put any cash into the hands of big industry...that won't happen.
"Except, it isn't. Less fuel economic cars get raped. It isn't just about everyone driving SUVs, but think of the poor family that cannot afford anything then that clunker from the 1980s. They are not getting the same mileage as the rich guy who decided to either "save" money or be more eco-friendly with his Hybrid. The cost of a hybrid is significantly more in some cases then its all fuel counterpart. So, in this case, the poorer are paying for the roads, while the richer are using less fuel and therefore paying less taxes, even if they are driving more."
And you don't think this is offset by the number of well-off people driving SUV's while the less well-off drive old econoboxes? I do. I'll wager it's more than offset, and if you were honest, you'd admit I'm right.
"Also, things other then cars run on fuel. These people are also paying for the roads. Gas powered lawn mowers burn on the same fuel. I don't think there are many mowers that are running down streets, especially if they are the walk-behind kind. Generators can run on fuel"
This is a pittance, don't try to pretend otherwise. It's nothing compared to what cars use, and I can't see the validity of considering it when talking about gas taxes.
So, apart from the bad example and the insignificant exception, do you have a real argument? As it stands, it sounds very much like you picking a position and trying very hard to find reasons to support it.
"the state collects $1.2 billion each year"
It's such a pity that most have forgotten why tarring & feathering was once done.
But a tax on fuel better reflects the vehicle's usage and how much wear it is putting on the roads. Even if you've got a cheap little Honda, if you drive it 2 hours to work everyday you should be paying more to help maintain the roads than the guy with the Rolls Royce who never takes it out of the driveway.
If the got rid of a little thing called earmarks, or, 'pork' in congressional budget bills, this whole thing would be a non issue. Instead of blowing money on useless things such as building a new lake in your congressional district or paying off the demons in your political closet, these hundreds of millions of dollars could go to things like *gasp* federal road funding.... People, the issue is not just how NC screwed up with this outrageous fine, but the 'problems causing the problems'
Walking, carpooling, avoiding the area completely, and having a suspended/no drivers license. I fully expect a fine for my 13-month-old daughter at any moment for the driving she would have done if she were of age.
By my logic, if you invent something and would like other people to benefit from it, go through the proper business channels to bring your product to the marketplace. However, in this guy's case, he was just bragging about the kind of fuel his car uses. Yes, he has "freedom of speech" to do so and I fully support that. What I'm saying is that in this post-9/11 world, exercising your Constitutional rights will usually get you flagged as "suspicious" and invite police attention. Yes, it's wrong. Sadly, that's what our nation has come to.
The scenic isn't big by American standards, it's a full meter shorter than the Ford 500, let alone an SUV or full sized pickup. But, that's decent economy for a decent sized car.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It is perilous to suggest, as you have, that fuel taxes be used for fiscal policy. As a tax on road infrastructure usage, fuel taxes are justified, agreeable, and successful in matching consumption of a public good with an equal penalty. But as a fee for unfashionable behavior, they cause widespread market distortion -- e.g. a large family's optimal decision may be to buy an older, larger car... a decision which apparently offends your prejudices.
And this isn't about greenhouse gas emissions: a per-gallon tax already addresses that (though perhaps it is not high enough). This is about you sacrificing others' efficiency in order to achieve an end that you and a few find aesthetically pleasing.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
This is just special pleadiing that since it's vegetable based fuel he shouldn't have to pay road tax. Wrong. He gets to pay road tax just like the rest of us, or don't use that fuel on public roads.
Frankly, biofuel users should pay no road tax, and instead road tax on petrofuels should be raised to compensate.
Until then? Less ambiguous bumper stickers are probably the prudent choice.
BTW, offroad fuel IIRC is dyed to stain fuel lines and if the stain is detected in an onroad vehicle it's supposed to be reported.. Veggie oil or biodiesel has no dyes...
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Seems like a good way to encourage people to be more productive. That'll probably work out well for the nation in the long run.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the idea of the gas tax being the end-all, be-all solution but that's the real reason this person was being "fined" - he hadn't paid the taxes required of usage. Whether or not this stands up in court is another matter (assuming it ever gets there)
Schnapple
#2 heating oil. on road diesel. off road diesel. clear diesel. dyed diesel. It's all the same thing. They all burn the same (without additives). They all have a specific gravity of .84. There's just different applications for each "type" of fuel.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
If you dont, Helios will be very angry with us.
Today's CAPTCHA: lulled.
If you tax the fuel, then you have the power to say "Hey, this particular fuel is BETTER for the environment so we will charge a reduced tax for using it."
That is what SHOULD be done in this particular case - using used vegetable oil is FAR better for the environment than throwing out the vegetable oil and buying diesel.
The current system has the potential to be far better than the 'level playing field' you desire.
The level playing field is a fool's choice
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm used to petrol prices in the uk - about 90p per litre right now, which works out about $6.50 per US gallon.
Most of that is tax.
The American car market is very different to the rest of the world - the scenic (and as large I was meaning the largest within its range as there is more than one model) is a very comfortably sized family car - most family cars here have very good fuel economy.
The cars with poor economy are not the large family cars, its SUVs, some sports cars and luxury cars with over sized engines. SUVs are unnecessary in the UK in almost all areas - especially cities, the other cars are expensive. If you want to pay so much for your car then you can pay for the fuel to run it - and the tax on that fuel.
No one is forcing people to drive such cars - and a pay as you spend system of tax is far fairer than a pay as you earn.
As for me? Well the last car I had was an older, larger car. A volvo S80, still does far better to the gallon than most US cars.
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
He should burn the fuel to make electricity and then charge an electric car with that. Then he can get around the tax but of course this isn't as efficient, so not as good for the environment.
Toll roads really really suck. A tax on gas is much easier to collect than setting up toll stations at each exit, or every ten miles (damn Garden State Parkway), and much more conveniant for the drivers (nobody likes to stop to pay tolls).
For a while, Oregon was one state where hybrids and electric were "double-charged" for state license registration. This was at the same time while Oregon was also giving a state tax break for buying one of those cars, so the left hand and right hand weren't talking.
Since Oregon relies on fuel tax heavily for the roads, the legislature felt that they were looking at a long-term dip in fuel taxes if more people started buying more efficient cars. It all started with talk of "paying their fair share" and how the owners of more efficient cars were effectively being freeloaders, and it eventually passed. Later, it was taken off the books.
You Upper Mexicans are getting petroleum from our oil sands! Better be careful or we'll take back all your favourite comedians, ya bunch a skinny bacon lovers. But I am sure that you will be good in the future, inshallah.
As an 11 year resident of this blighted shithouse I'd like to point out that:
You pay a sales tax on your car. Also an annual property tax on your car via a statement sent to your house. You pay separate registration, plate and inspection fees each year. We have the highest gas taxes in the south. The tax is pegged to a factor on the wholesale cost so it generally goes up no matter what the price of gas does, otherwise. It is of course adjusted every time the retail price does go up though so you're guaranteed to pay the highest possible price all of the time. By the way we typically lead the country in malfunctioning gas pumps too - about 1 in 12 is cheating you as reported in earlier N&O stories. I myself recently put 18 gallons into a 15.5 gallon tank. The only recourse though is to fill out some massive paperwork and then sue the retailer - up to the disputed value of the fuel, in this case about $7.50. The state's assumption of responsibility stops at the certification sticker on the pump. If it's there, it must be right.
It is also not permissible under law to sue your own car insurance company if they flat out refuse to pay a claim. Nor is there any arbitration mechanism. I'm guessing there's a lot of insurance salesmen in the state legislature.
Last but not least, the Great State of Redneckistan still employs the old Boss Hogg method of revenue enhancement: traffic tickets. Cities and counties OPENLY hand out tickets for the fines. In Raleigh NC population 350,000 the police write more than 2,000 tickets per day everyday. That number spikes to about 5,000 tickets per day once the city exhausts their fuel budget for the year like they did after Katrina.
We're also the home of THE MOST expensive interstate highway ever built, in the history of the US. I-540 represents more than $30 million per mile because of fraud, theft, shoddy work, delays and other factors. The thing I think that sticks in my craw though is this nonsense claim that all these taxes, fines, fees are for road improvement. Anyone who drives in NC knows that the roads are all crap. The state is one huge work zone where nothing ever gets fixed, ever. The stretch of I-40 from RTP to Hillsborough has been 'under construction' since 1995 with no apparent progress at all other than annual 'emergency repairs' made to fix shoddy work from the last contractor. This results in lane closures and massive delays as each 'unplanned project' results in small sections of the roads being closed. The reason for making so many work zones though is of course revenue as the speed limit of 45 mph results in $500-$1000 fines for each speeder.
So a $2500 fine for not buying gasoline? That's nothing. He should be happy he wasn't ticketed or arrested in this fascist police RED state. Fuck North Carolina.
So you're making an argument for the right to have a car? I like Slashdot, apparently I should have a free car, free entertainment, free software, and free internet access, all paid from the pockets of the rich. Sign me up!
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The guy wasn't using gasoline or diesel. (Those are fuels named in the gas tax law, ethanol is in there as well). Vegetable oil is none of these. Where's the gas tax evasion? It isn't there. Just because he placed the vegetable oil in his diesel tank, doesn't make it diesel. They are using terms "fuel tax" when it's not written that way.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Here in NY, gas tax is somewhere around 63 cents per gallon. I drive about 9000 miles a year at 22 mpg. So I buy 409 gallons, paying $258 in fuel taxes. I also paid $1166 in (real) property taxes to my town and county (not counting a separate school tax). Not all of that $1166 goes to road maintenance, but some does. Same with the 8% sales tax that I pay between the county and state.
Anyway, the point being that my $71 in registration fees (which is higher than your average person will pay) doesn't even cover road construction... The vast majority of road money in NY comes from fuel taxes, property taxes and state/federal aid. A good chunk of registration money just goes into operating costs of the DMV.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Fuel tax is a road tax. Bio-fuels burn cleaner and reduce the dependence on foreign source of fuel. This is a case of recycling also. Just as most states do with solar electric cars or hybrid cars, they normally turn a blind eye, since it's not a big problem yet. These cars are about what? One in the million? Right now we want to increase that number.
This is a clear case of someone being an asshole. It happens. But now you can do something about it. Please give generously to the Asshole Saving Society. We can help. With our special treatment of public humiliation and constant public pressure we might be able to cure this asshole, and with your money many others. We host a number of interventions all around the country and have a permanent office in the capitol where we work around the clock. IF we can't help this asshole nobody can.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Long Live SRV !!!
Score 4 funny? I don;t think that's right.
I agree, and this is what it was all about, from the state's perspective. They couldn't give a rat's ass what he burns, as long as they get their tax money. He was using the gov't 'pay to play' infrastructure for free.
Could there be a way to asses road taxes more fairly? I'm sure. Some sort of per mile tax or something, including bicycles, etc, but I'm sure that would be considered an invasion of privacy.
This has absolutely nothing to do with oil producers, etc. If you were using heating oil, you'd still get fined, and the oil companies see the same amount of money. They don't see any of the tax money.
If he wants to be environmentally friendly, go ahead, but pay the state the taxes they so desperately want.
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
For many pollutants, using a grease/oil like vegetable oil is actually LESS polluting than using fuel oil or diesel, and for some pollutants, it's on a similar clean-burning level to natural gas. IIRC, grease/oil will emit a higher amounts of particulates (i.e. soot) but lower amounts of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide (versus fuel oil/diesel).
I am talking about a compromise.
Oh, you mean like minimum wage, which hurts the poor, instead of "helping" them.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I don't understand what the problem is.
If the fuel tax in NC was put in place to discourage petroleum use the way the cigarette tax was put in place to discourage smoking, I could see why this would be an issue. However, the tax is there to pay for road construction and maintenance. This guy is driving an automobile which is causing wear on the roads. Why should he be tax exempt? If the Road Construction Tax was tacked onto his State Income Tax bill, he would have to pay it. So why shouldn't he pay it as a fuel tax?
It is clear to me that the State Legislature was trying to find a fair and balanced tax law that would require people to pay Road Maintenance taxes equal to the amount of driving they do. A tax on fuel is not exact, but it is a close measure. The alternative is a New Jersey-like scenario where you have a ridiculous amount of tolls on the highway. Personally, I would prefer the gas tax over the toll so I can better enjoy the beautiful NC countryside.
Bottom line: if an enforceable law is put in place by the State legislature, then State law enforcement has an obligation to enforce it. If the State legislature wants to encourage alternative fuel use, they will just need to draw up a law waiving the **Road Maintenance** tax for non-petrol fuels.
--x
There are places that tax cars as personal property each year. I used to live in Missouri and paid hundreds of dollars in sales tax, then hundreds of dollars each year to keep my car, and hundreds of dollars a year in gasoline taxes, about a hundred on state and city licenses for the car with the required safety inspection, and ten bucks for a new driver's license every time I moved or one expired (every three years). License plates cost more based on horsepower, or at least they used to. Custom plates are seriously more expensive than random plates. They tax on the depreciated value of the car, and if the car is under a certain value you pay no tax. IIRC, the personal property tax was actually to your county of residence.
Now I live in Illinois. I paid sales tax. My driver's license is good for six years. I don't pay personal property taxes on the car. Plates are a bit more expensive than basic Missouri plates, but there's no mandatory yearly safety inspection to pay for, there's no horsepower tax, and custom plates are only nominally more. Yet, Illinois roads and bridges tend to be in better shape than those in Missouri. Part of it is, of course, because the state has so many more residents paying those taxes, and the fuel tax is higher. It still seems like a better system to me. Some areas of the state do have smog inspections and additional taxes, and large parts of the Chicago area have tolls on the Interstate highway system. The effect still seems to be better on regular guys like me.
... seeing as I skateboard to work, should I pay a fuel tax on the food that gives me energy to push?
Sorry to post, AC, but the NC general statutes (laws on the books right now) say :
.... even a half assed lawyer should have a field day with this.
Alternative Fuel Tax Exemption
The retail sale, use, storage or consumption of alternative fuels is exempt from the state retail sales and use tax. (Reference North Carolina General Statutes 105-164.13)
So
We should just use up all the rest of the gas so we can develop other alternative. ANY OTHER alternative. Once all the oil is gone, we can use electric, bio, alcohol, or even farts. Just as long as no more money goes to people who hate us.
Read the fine print. I checked local legislation here and most of it refers to diesel, but if you look up the terminology definition section 'diesel' is defined as including bio-diesel, which is what this is. I'd guess there's probably something similar in the relevant NC statute.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
E. Norris Tolson Secretary of Revenue (919) 733-7211
Julian W. Fitzgerald, Sr. Director Motor Fuels Division (919) 733-8200
The full departmental directory can be found here: http://www.dor.state.nc.us/aboutus/department.html
Gov. Michael Easley's contact info page: http://www.governor.state.nc.us/Contact.asp
(info courtesy of a post on Digg: http://digg.com/environment/Driver_ticketed_for_us ing_biofuel)
...///...
The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage. The tax would more accurately go against the weight of the car and the number of miles driven, as those two factors have more to do with how much wear and tear you cause on the states infrastructure.
But such vehicles (i.e. large heavy vehicles) also tend to cause more damage to the environment (correction: to our environment). So why shouldn't they pay more?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Venezuela is not Arab. If you swing those numbers correctly non-Arab is the major importer.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Could you give some links to the information you're using? I'd love to see it. (Of course, it won't be good for my blood pressure, but I'm sure it'll be informative.)
But you could also argue that if the minimum wage worker lost his ability to get to work, he'd be a lot more screwed than the rich guy, who probably has some savings or at least credit to live on for a bit. Heck, the rich guy might be able to just work from home, whereas that wouldn't be possible for most minimum wage jobs. So who really benefits more from the road - the guy who absolutely needs it to get by, or the guy who could get along fine without it?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
BTW, offroad fuel IIRC is dyed to stain fuel lines and if the stain is detected in an onroad vehicle it's supposed to be reported.. Veggie oil or biodiesel has no dyes...
Biodiesel should if it's non-taxed.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I also note that you completely ignored the parent's question about electric cars.
Take off your aluminum foil hat, and go outside. There's really no one watching you from your neighbors bushes. The State wants their tax money. The laws may not be perfect, but they say that you need to pay money to the state to use fuel in your car.
Are fuel taxes perfect? no. They don't directly tax how much benefit you get from the roads. They also will tax you if you use the fuel in other things (although the couple of gallons of gas I use in my lawn mower every year is hardly worth mentioning). So what? What possible better solution could there be? Do you want to pay someone to read your odometer? Maybe put a tracking device in your car to see how far you go on state roads? Maybe driving habits, like frequent stops and accelerations have a lot to do with the wear and tear on the roads. Maybe you should be taxed more if you use the roads after the snow storm because your tax money goes to the snow plows to clear the path for you. Oh wait, I've got an even better idea! Why don't we just tax the gasoline so that it works out to be pretty fair 99% of the time! Excellent idea Jeff!
This article should be a warning to people to make sure they are within the tax laws when they use bio diesel. But of course, on slashdot, everyone wants to bring up their ideas to change the friggin world! Oh well, that's really why I read it anyways.
They do that already in my state and still have taxes on the fuel. The tax amount per car is based on the cars value. So a 50k car is taxed higher then a 7k car. But we still pay taxes on fuel and the roads are still full of pot holes. Maybe all this revenue is going else where? I would love to see a law passed that forced the governments (local, county, state, and federal) to show all the revenue coming in and where it goes down to the penny. This will never happen though. The budgets that are posted are lacking. We did an estimated tax per household for our area (using what I pay I make 40k a year) times the number of houses. Based on their budget our tax revenue figured almost 70% of the budget. So either those people with the $3-4 million homes (small hotels) pay the same amount of taxes or something is very, very wrong.
You need to think a little bit about some of those things, because they don't pass the laugh test.
Toll roads? They're only practical on major highways. And even then they reduce the efficiency of the roadway and cost more to implement than a gas tax.
Lawnmowers, generators etc? Look for a gas station that sells fuel labeled as "not for highway use". You won't pay the tax on it. Admittedly, they're hard to find in urban areas, but those people are also less likely to have a lawn to mow, etc...
Regardless of all that, this guy was breaking the law. They've grabbed people for years for running their diesels on home heating oil, and this is no different (but easier to detect).
*cough* Or The Beatles.
Only in proportion to the petrodiesel content. B20 = 80% road tax, B50 = 50% road tax, etc..
(also, "more ambiguous", not less.. wizard needs coffee badly...)
So the rich guy should also pay more for big macs, software, electronics and other consumer goods? It's only fair, correct (/sarcasm)
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
you can't "really make taxation progressive by taxing the percentage of the vehicle's value to bring in the necessary revenue," because that's the same principal as sales tax which is the primary example of a regressive tax.
Sales tax is regressive? How so? If my consumption goes up (i.e., I'm rich), then I pay more tax. If my consumption goes down (i.e., I'm poor), I pay less. If food is not taxed (typically it's not), and (say) children's clothing is not taxed, then the regressive components of sales tax are minimized.
A nationwide VAT (with the above exceptions) is really a much better idea than an income tax. Easier to administer; easier to monitor; much more difficult to avoid. Rich people will buy lots of expensive stuff and pay lots of taxes. Poor people won't.
Of course, eliminating the income tax would cause a host of other problems, like the elimination of the mortgage interest deduction (the subsidy the government pays to the housing industry), the elimination of agricultural subsidies through favorable taxation, and so on. So it's not something that can be done casually, or without a great deal of pain to [someone].
Interesting to wonder where this leads. I mean are they going to fine the Amish billions in unpaid taxes? I think you hit on something though, if electric cars cannot be fined then this guy is probably also exempt. I mean you're going to have to fine everyone or no one really.
I'm interested in the claim you made about profit per gallon sold. Can you please provide some reference material, preferably online???
Those who can, do.
Someone needs to go Fight Club on their ass...I heard about this before and I knew that big oil would not let anything of the sort into the country until the last drop of oil is gone.
:'(
I drive a land yacht (12-15 mpg, woohoo!), and to that British fellow: I inherited my car and I could not afford a new one for the 8 years I have driven it (the first half of which gas was not criminally expensive). I'm saving up for a brand new car (which should, incidentally, be around the 2 year anniversary of graduating from college), which I don't expect to be much more fuel efficient (most likely a Dodge with a beefy engine). I am also large (6'5") and I don't fit into the compacts...I barely fit into a mid-size sedan...and I need the high torque of a big motor to haul my fat ass around. Even if I were in top-shape, I'd still be to heavy for a little four banger to perform adequately...my motorcycle does fine on 1100cc, but it's only 700 lbs...and a presently inoperative
I tagged it humor because of the keystone cops aspect. We are just beginning to do something about a problem that has been going on since the seventies. Our idea of fair is market competition or regulated monopolies. OPECs idea of fair is collusion in price fixing and sharing the profits. We can't win against that unless we do some investing in alternatives that the market won't spring for because OPEC can just lower prices and destroy any hope of return on investment. So, on the one hand we are beginning to find ways to protect such investments but on the other, we are so in OPEC's thrawl that our systems of taxation work against the inovations we need. You are right that it is a little inappropriate to laugh at the guy this is happening to, though a John Cleese prat fall is funny because of the manner in which he injures himself, but it is appropriate to laugh at the awkwardness of a government that is defeating itself; we are laughing at ourselves. The derision may also lead to improvement though the guy's respectful response is likely to be more effective. Jokes explained are no longer funny, but the question came up a few times.s -selling-solar.html
--
Have fun with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
How could anyone think of ANYTHING but the Beatles with lyrics to Taxman??
"But this one goes to 11!"
What's bad about this is that using cooking oil as motor fuel gives you carbon-neutral driving! This oil comes from soybeans, rapeseed, etc. All the carbon in this fuel came out of the air, not out of the ground.
-mcgrew
I am out of mod points, but that is a great post.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
And before you ask how I afforded a motorcycle: it was $900 bucks, which I scrimped and saved during university! Quite a feat, if I may say so. It's older than my car and gets a little over double the fuel economy. Although oddly enough, my car has been getting about 30-50 miles more per tank in the last year...either my driving habits have changed or the fuel is different.
Did he make the oil himself? If he bought it he paid some form of tax (unless NC is a tax free state).
I think it would be better to charge by weight and fuel mileage rating. It you want to drive a hummer, 78' lincoln ltd, or mac truck you need to pay more for the car's pollution and abuse to the roads. Some guy who drives a 50k bmw and keeps it in top shape is not doing damage like the guy with a 3 ton truck pouring smoke out the tail pipe. This is one case where I do not see a graduated tax system doing the most good.
Tax Maaaaaaannnnnn! If you walk, I'll tax your feet.
Nice pull, but too obscure for most 20-somethings.
ah.clem
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
I'm in Pennsylvania (NE US, for you foreigners, though I'm sure you know geography better than we do..) and I can't wait for a Smart fortwo.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
(sighs, rolls eyes to heaven) No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I'm not even saying I'm for progressive taxes. I'm mainly for lower taxes, and then it wouldn't make so much difference whether you soak the rich or the poor -- you don't "soak" anyone! I've heard taxation likened to trying to attach as many leeches to the economy as possible without killing it, and unfortunately I think that's a fairly accurate description of taxes in my beloved US of A. Back on topic, though, I was merely making an argument that an automobile tax isn't any more progressive (as the parent to my original post suggested) than a fuel tax. I was saying that many poor people will need a car, I didn't say anyone owed them one. I'm sure most could come up with some other option if it came down to it -- live closer to work, work closer to home, car pool, work from home, etc, but most buy cars that probably cost them a greater percentage of their income than richer people's cars are of their incomes.
I think the leech analogy applies to this story. When the state sees people driving on something besides fossil fuels, they see a spot that doesn't have a leech on it yet. To be fair, I suppose the state has a point here: If fuel taxes are supposed to pay for the roads, and suddenly everyone started using veg oil and the fuel taxes dried up then they'd need to make up the money somehow to maintain the roads. But it seems pretty ridiculous to fine this guy who probably had no idea that he owed the state money and would have been happy to pay it if he had.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Also, things other then cars run on fuel. These people are also paying for the roads. Gas powered lawn mowers burn on the same fuel. I don't think there are many mowers that are running down streets, especially if they are the walk-behind kind. Generators can run on fuel. These also do not move down the road, so why are they taxed to pay for roads in the same way as fuel used to power a vehicle?
I'll be running auto gas in my airplane. It's a simple form you fill out to get a reimbursement for the taxes you paid on the auto gas.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Why in proportion? The tax is for using the road and the consumption of fuel is the easiest way to measure that. Why should someone using the same roads get a break?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
In all fairness, it would probably be a much wiser decision to do taxes on the vehicle and eliminate fuel taxes altogether.
I think that's a rather poor idea. A fuel tax taxes people who actually use the roads. Eliminating the fuel tax would eliminate that tie between road usage and tax. You'd also not tax anyone from outside the state who uses the roads, which for some states is a big chunk of income. You'll also unfairly penalize people who don't drive much, and give a large break to people who drive a lot. Not a great incentive for people to use the roads more efficiently, or buy more fuel efficient cars.
Of course, the taxes on vehicles are more or less flat, so a vehicle worth $50k will pay the same tax as a vehicle worth $7k.
Same here. In MN our former wrestler/governor had a bug up his butt about the high vehicle tax for expensive vehicles. I don't remember the specifics of how it came out, but after a year or two the tax is essentially flat.
AccountKiller
So you just bend over and take it?
Yeah, that one works great.
Vegetable oil is NOT bio-diesel. bio diesel is the result of refining, purifying vegetable oil, with additives like detergents, etc... Pure vegetable oil is, I repeat, NOT bio-diesel. FYI - My neighbor owns a bio-diesel plant. Trust me on this one.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
In case you don't *trust me on this*...
f ault.shtm/
Here's the info straight from the source...
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/definitions/de
Single quote from that page... Biodiesel is not the same thing as raw vegetable oil.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
This happened in Illinois as well; the legislature let him off the hook:
s /doc4653ac993dc89143644524.txt
SPRINGFIELD --A 79-year-old Decatur man who runs his Volkswagen Golf with vegetable oil could soon be spared paying a state fee to keep it running.
David Wetzel has run his 1986 VW on veggie oil for about five years, but recently got a visit from state Department of Revenue agents. They wanted him to pay $2,500 for a license as a fuel supplier because he was making his own fuel.
When Wetzel protested and didn't pay, the state told him it'd be a felony.
Lawmakers took notice, and they voted 115-0 Tuesday to let Wetzel off the hook. The measure still needs Gov. Rod Blagojevich's signature to become law, and the Senate already approved it.
. . .
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/05/22/new
If taxes on vehicles are to be fair, they should be in line with the damage these vehicles do to the road and the environment. That 70's clunker car taht spews oil smoke all over the road should be charged 100 or 1000 times a modern one that doesn't emit much at all. Or since a 80,000lb truck does 400 times the damage that a 4,000lb car does per mile of road. That 80,000lbs deflects a road or bridge 20 times as much and carries 20 times the weight of that car. So do trucks pay 400 times per mile what cars are charged? No! Trucks get 7MPG versus 28MPG for cars. So they pay only 4 times as much per mile as cars. So if cars pay $0.40 a gallon in gasoline, trucks should pay $40.00 a gallon on diesel for the damage they cause. The bad part is that a typical semi drives 300K miles to the 15k miles a car does a year. That car pays about $300 for gas taxes and licensing fees for those 15K miles or about 2 cents per mile and that truck pays about $17,500 in its diesel taxes and licensing costs or about 5.8 cents per mile. That means that the 100 million cars pay $30 billion and the million trucks pay $17.5 billion. According to fairness, trucks should pay 15.7 cents per mile and cars 0.04 cents per mile. They wopuld then pay $47,100 each for $47.1 billion and cars pay $6 each for $0.6 billion yielding about $47.7 billion compared to $47.5 billion now. That works out to diesel taxes of 109.9 cents a gallon and gas taxes of 1.12 cents per gallon, if all in fuel taxes. As you can see there is a big bias in the current system towards heavier vehicles.-$41
If we had 40 cent fuel taxes, licenses for 4,000lb 28MPG cars should be rebated to the tune of $46 and 80,000lb trucks should cost $30,000. Putting this in perspective for vehicle weights, a 2,000lb 50MPG 2 seater car license should be rebated $78, a 6,000lb 24MPG large car license should cost $128, a 8,000lb 18MPG midsize SUV license should cost $339, a 12,000lb 12MPG large SUV license should cost $1,012 and a 20,000lb 9MPG straight truck driven an average of 100K miles should cost $23,556.
Since trucks have to keep mileage logs, it would be easy to calculate how much they should pay in taxes to maintain the road system at their gross vehicle weight. To make it more fair, trucks should square their instant weight every mile and total that for all miles they travel. They then are charged so much in taxes for every ton squared mile they went minus fuel taxes they paid. Audits and random weight checks would make sure they aren't playing hanky panky with the tax loggers. Cars under 2.25 tons aren't charged per mile as they likely pay more in fuel taxes than the damage they do. SUVs and pickups should be checked as to what their miles driven were in figuring their taxes as they likely didn't pay their fair share, if they are driven a lot. This would push people into buying only the amount of car they can afford, higher MPG vehicles are more valuable and their would be a high bias against those big heavy monsters. Another would be to enhance the push off long distance freight hauling to trains and ships. Lastly since the tax loggers could get GPS, they could split it with the states equitably and road segments could see what wear they see versus what they have been subjected to allowing for more damage resistant roads to be engineered for cost effectiveness. And it would be easy to see that a $1 billion tunnel here would pay for itself in fuel costs in 3.2 years over going up and over the ridge now there.
That would be more fair to road users.
Personally, I feel that gas taxes are one of the fairest taxes the government imposes, as it's an actual usage tax. If you use the infrastructure more, you pay more in taxes.
As another poster has said, that is what tolls are for.
NJ has the lowest gas prices in the nation because they charge tolls for usage on their major highways.
It makes sense because in theory you can drive from Philadelphia, PA to NYC without stopping to buy gas in NJ therefore avoiding the gas tax all together if there was one. Really... Its better for people that live in NJ since they benefit all around, but when I'm over there visiting friends or shopping I'll fill up on gas because I would pay the $3.00 exit tolls regardless.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If he's using it as fuel, it's still fuel.
To
Sales taxes take a larger percentage of *income* from lower income persons than higher income persons, generally, and even if you include the lower amount of sales taxed items that the poor pay for -- as a percentage of income -- it is still more than the rich person pays. Remember that high income earners most likely spend more of their money on things that aren't taxed as sales. Luxury taxes are what I think you instead want to promote.
And in this discussion, we're really talking about use taxes or consumption taxes, since it's the use or consumption of an item that we are trying to offset -- in this case road use on an indirect measure (fuel). We really should be taxing by weight of the vehicle times the road, since increased efficiencies will be promoted and it actually reflects the amount of damage put on the roadway (it can be curved higher for higher weights since higher weights actually cause more damage per weight than lower weight vehicles -- the damage isn't linear).
So, Remember that Regressivity/Progressivity of a tax system is defined by percentage of income.
Even in Utah (not the most environmentally aware state in the nation), they have ways of dealing with this. Here, alternative fuel vehicles are registered with the state as such, and owners are required to buy a license that covers the expected revenues they would have received from driving with gasoline. They sell them for $85 or $125 (depending on the type of vehicle), regardless of how much you actually drive.
My brother-in-law has been considering modding his truck to use natural gas. He drives all over the state installing satellite dishes, and he figures that he'll be saving hundreds of dollars a year, simply based on the difference between the $85 he'd pay for the license, and the amount he actually pays in state gas taxes. That's not even counting federal.
I really don't see the purpose of posting a $2,500 bond, as the story says NC requires. Generally, when you post a bond, you can do something to get it back. If you post bail, you get the money back by showing up in court when you're expected to. What do you do to get this money back? Prove that the car is now destroyed, and you never actually drove it anywhere?
Buncha redneck idiots. Just set up some standard fee structure that applies to any untaxed fuel, and stop buggin' people!
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Granted the horsepower is not as high - the Celebrity would have been the lowest of the three vehicles, and the Mazda3 would be the highest. Only two things with this respect are important - (i) acceleration and (ii) miles-per-gallon. Acceleration is only important in getting going; HP, torque, and transmission gear selection together drives this.
Now I could be wrong, but I believe it is a relatively common complaint that older vehicles got better mileage per gallon. Some vehicles (e.g. Suburban, Hummer, etc.) won't hold to that, but the vehicles that the Average Joe is buying falls into this.
Please correct if I am wrong.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I suspect if the song ended up in a Guitar Hero II song pack it'd be "as made famous by Steve Ray Vaughan"
/ 2134221
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/12
R Tape loading error, 0:1
This just points to the short comings of English and the code writers jargonistic attempts at brevity. If they had always written, "he/she and or trans-gendered individuals," or "one or more individuals/partnerships/corporations or other legal entities," every time a simple pronoun or tense would do in normal speech then the code books would be twice as long end even more incomprehensible. Remember lawyers parse the code at the warning level 3 looking for an out. Laws are not written for well indented people, but for those bent on ill-will.
Weather may damage roads more than vehicles do but vehicles still do damage.
In some instances, if you have a pothole or even a crack in the pavement, vehicles AND weather contribute synergistically to the destruction of the surface. That splash you see when a wheel hits the hole on a rainy day can generate a fair amount of pressure that wouldn't be as much if it were simply air.
It would be interesting to prorate wear and tear based on weather, subsurface conditions and vehicles/users, especially with breakdowns by type of vehicle/user.
More like "Stevie Ray Vaughn (as made famous by the Beatles)"
Or Jimi Hendrix...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Not at all. I just keep quiet about what I'm doing. There's a difference.
Why the hell do they need GPS for this? Why not just a mileage tax assessed at inspection time, based on the odometer? "Oh, I drive mostly out of state" -- what, you don't think your neighboring states will get access to your GPS data and charge you accordingly? Seriously, if there's going to be per-mile taxes, I'd rather not have even more government surveillance thrown in as a freebie for the state. Just charge what the odometer says, and have done.
Agreed, ethanol is easier to produce, however, the production of ethanol impacts more than just the fuel market. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/ 22/2045228 Not to mention the fact that it has a significantly lower energy yield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_conte nt than gasoline, making the adoption of ethanol entirely political and not economical at all.
Not really. Most 20-somethings would get that. Your username, however, is a bit more obscure, Mister ah.clem.
If I decide I don't want to pay tax on tomatoes (I know, no sales tax on food, but this works), I can grow my own. Say I pay the say 10% tax on $1.00 worth of seeds and then grow a crop of 40 tomatoes. Now if I were to buy 40 tomatoes in the store for $1.00 apiece, the government would get $4.00 of that, however I only paid them $0.10. Did I just steal $3.90? Of course not, and it's the same with biodiesel fuel.
.... sales tax. Everyone has a right to use the roads even if they don't buy fuel. Ask almost any cyclist.
Actually, this works better with beer. I am allowed to brew my own beer at home and do not need a distributor's license or anything as long as I don't sell my beer to anyone, just as I should be able to "brew" my own fuel for "free" just as long as I don't sell it to anyone else.
So, what about the road maintenance? Those are generally paid for via licensing and registration fees and
But seriously... "illegal fuel"?! That's like finding out that you can digest dirt and the state fining you for "illegal food" because you were outside licking the ground.
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
Uh, farmers do have the ability to buy untaxed fuel. The fuel is dyed so that it can be checked if used on public roads. In fact that is probably what the checkpoint from TFA was for.
-Brandon
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, But those who never win and never quit are idiots.
When my family only had one vehicle, a relatively high mileage compact car, the amount I paid in gas taxes, Federal and state, was less than what I paid in property taxes for transportation related bond issues (i.e. road repairs and enhancements). My house was subsidizing the roads used by cars, trucks, motorycles, busses and bicycles. The bicycles, to the best of my knowledge, generated the least amount of wear and tear per mile traveled. The trash trucks, based on weight, generated the greatest.
For those people that don't have motorized vehicles and that choose to walk or ride bicycles, payment for the roads come from property taxes, even if their usage is minimal. They are subsidizing the drivers.
Then there are second order subsidies. Parking lots, in many places, are required for businesses. Those parking lots have to be maintained by the businesses so the costs of goods and services has parking lot maintenance costs hidden in them. If you happen to be riding the bus or walking to a store, you are paying for the parking lots AND often having to walk a longer distance because the parking lots are NOT transit or walking friendly.
I would be willing to bet he's talking about 46 kilometers per gallon.
never heard the beatles version.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
It's pretty easy to disconnect the speedo cable between inspections.
"Nope, didn't drive my car at all this year, except twice to 7-11."
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
GPS devices to track mileage?!? Why not just use the odometer? Well, besides the obvious reason that while an odometer tracks mileage, a GPS unit can be used to track position. That power would never be abused, I'm certain.
This is wrong in any possible way i can think of. Both from an economic, enviromental and governmental viewpoint. First of all the fuel in this case has already been taxed multiple times. It is enviromentally friendly so it should not in any way be taxed like gasoline etc which is extremely bad for mother nature. From a taxation viewpoint in no way should the propulsion agent be taxed for road maintenance and such. If thats the case then the right way would be to move that tax from the energy source to the car itself or the cars milage / year. To punish alternative fuels and propulsion systems wont fix the current oil strangelhold. The countries who can realease themselves from oil dependance is the countries who will rule in the future. As it looks now China is the one country who seems most eager to pull that feat off. The US, well, the war in Iraq says it all. Oil supply is still the number one thing on the agenda and finding alternatives on the bottom of the list.
HTTP/1.1 400
It could always end up as a prorated odometer tax, based on distance traveled times a 'wear and tear' factor.
If the 'wear and tear' factor considers such things as miles per gallon, tail pipe output, type and severity of accidents, average passenger load, weight per axle/tire, usage and other factors, it could be fine tuned to produce a 'fair' tax that could then be used for the construction/repair of roads as well as transportation related support services like EMTs, fire, police and medical.
Entities like police, fire and public transit might have their prorated odometer tax calculated but 'forgiven' since it would involve moving money from one public pocket to another. Private 'social services' might get a discount on the rate IF it can be shown that they are helping people.
As with any tax, it would be 'unfair' to somebody. But the inequity might be less doing things this way.
This could also address the MPG factor IF low MPGs were penalized.
Nonsense on both counts, if you ask me. Have we forgotten that when people drive, they affect more than simply the road they drive on - e.g., air quality? So, if someone buys a gallon and uses it up in driving 40 miles to work, they've used more of the road than the average person; on the other hand, if someone else buys a gallon and uses it up driving 10 miles to work, should they really be taxed less? Though driving less, they've most likely polluted more than the average person.
Cars with poor gas mileage should be penalized, as they are with the gas tax - and I say that as the owner of a rather inefficient vehicle. If anything, gas taxes ought to be raised - it would mean more revenue (ah, if only it were spent wisely), and more incentive to give tax breaks to those using cleaner fuels, as well as giving people cause to reduce gas consumption.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
New problem: This encourages cheap cars, which tend to be older and therefore less safe, less fuel efficient, etc...
4.4% of $3k extra for a hybrid would be an extra $132/year. Along with increased insurance costs it's one more obstacle for them to overcome to be economical, and therefore truly widespread.
I happen to like the gas tax, I agree that it's one of the fairer ones out there. Lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles damage the roads less, so there's less tax there. It encourages fuel efficiency a bit, punishes less efficient more polluting cars a bit, etc...
It's also simple and while occasionally 'unfair' if you're crossing borders or not using the roads(lawnmowers?), it also doesn't invade privacy much.
I don't read AC A human right
You cant change the world
But you can change the facts
And when you change the facts
You change points of view
If you change points of view
You may change a vote
And when you change a vote
You may change the world
If you drive for your work or have a small fleet of trucks, biodiesel is a winner. The key is to find a local restaurant willing to do business with you. They have waste oil and need to have it reliably removed. The equipment needed to clean that kind of oil is not expensive and your business will save money on fuel, especially now that the Iraq war has blown the price of petrol through the roof. An added benefit is that biodiesel is easier on your engine and my lungs, so both last longer. I know someone who's been doing this for years and he's very happy with it.
Taxes are always a wild card. It would suck if big oil managed to tax away biodiesel.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fairness? If I drive my Corolla an average of four miles to work once a week, why should I be paying the same for street maintenance as somebody else who drives the same car 30 miles every day?
Of course, as it is now, I'm probably paying more than that hypothetical person who drives their car in to work every day. Most of the city's street maintenance budget comes from property taxes, not fuel taxes, and I payed significantly more for my house to live somewhere where my wife and I could both get to work without a car. Personally, I'd prefer to see higher fuel taxes, because short of actually tracking the number of miles people drive, it seems to be the best way to get the people who are actually using the roads to pay for them.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
She calls shenanigans on all of the car companies that can manufacture cars in Canada, Australia, Europe, Asia and even Africa that get 35 or more mpg, and are making them right now, but claim they can't do it here. She's right.
Sorry, but she's mostly wrong. Yes, they could produce a 35mpg car. However, it becomes difficult when you consider our stringent safety and pollution standards, and mostly impossible when you add in consumer demand for acceleration, cargo & passenger capacity, and cost.
You can go to a dealer lot in my area right now and purchase a new vehicle that makes a combined 32mpg(Ford Focus). The Honda Civic Coupe is 34mpg. Problem is, they don't sell well when compared to SUVs and trucks.
If Feinstein gets the legislation she wants, it's most likely effect would be to drive even more people to SUVs and trucks. Do we really want that?
I don't read AC A human right
Because, to paraphrase Reagan, Milton Friedman, et al. :
If you want less of something, tax it.
I believe we should stop using petrofuels, therefore tax them more, but reward people for using biofuels. This turns into a wonderfully vicious/virtuous cycle where governments need to keep hiking petro taxes higher as petro use goes down. Until we are completely weaned from imported petroleum, _then_ start applying some taxes to biofuels.
Learn to read. Venezuela is an OPEC member. How the fuck did you miss that? Did you drop out of pre-school?
Your entire argument is semantic. You equate taxes with punishment and draw some muddled distinction between benefiting and deriving value, and another one between providing and reallocating. All I can get from this is you think poor people are lazy. Sorry, please try again when you have a real argument to make.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
minimum wage worker lost his ability to get to work
Now, I might be a bit off here, but in my experience most businesses that employed minimum wage earners end up making compromises in this area, even to the point of sending a manager to pick the worker up if necessary.
Heh, you could almost make an arguement for the workers to quit and go on welfare for a while. Wages would end up rising, as the work still needs to be done*.
*Areas teeming with other unemployed or illegals willing to work for minimum aside.
I don't read AC A human right
I live in an Amish community where the horses literally tear the road to shreds in about 1 year (1 year is a VERY short lifespan for a chip and seal or blacktopped rural road). They aren't taxed for their horses and our community still keeps decent roads for being a rural area with a very high horse to car ratio. Sounds like NC is being plain greedy if we can keep our roads decent. The more I think about the more I think I am turning libertarian if this is what our country is coming to...
I only know of this incident what was in the article, but this is the paragraph that caught my eye:
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
I'm unclear about this. The government in America does not have the right to search your gas tank without your consent. If they were waiting outside a place where RVs congregate, the most they could do constitutionally would be to politely ask all the owners for consent to search, or ask them if they were using legal fuel. Anything more than that would be unreasonable, unwarranted, and unconstitutional. So, did the veggie oil guy, and all the other RV drivers, volunteer consent for search? Why would they do that?
Actually, that's absolutely wrong. The amount I pay, before taxes, to the oil companies for their fuel is directly related to the supply vs. the demand. Does it cost them any more to retrieve oil when there is a war going on? Then why does the price go up every time something flairs up in an oil producing region?
So, if an individual is unnecessarily using a lot of fuel that directly impacts how much I pay, no matter how efficient my vehicle is or how little I use it. I pay close to $80 dollars a month in gas now, and I use my car a lot less than I did 10 years ago when it cost about $60 a month. I don't use a lot of gas, but I am paying for the gas people driving older, larger cars are using.
It boils down to the following:
1) There is a limited supply of oil, period. As time goes on, that supply decreases and the value goes up until it becomes so expensive that there is no longer a market for it.
2) The more fossil fuel each person consumes, the sooner it becomes too expensive to use.
3) The more people switch to alternative fuels, the longer it will be before fossil fuels become too expensive to use.
4) Thus, each person using alternative fuels or conserving fossil fuels is subsidizing the cost of fossil fuels.
Aesthetically pleasing? Give me a break!
"' Sure, since the field is so plainly tilted against Arab oil interests."
Says who? What people don't seem to get is that fuel prices will continue to go up as supply diminishes. Gasoline and the like are fossil fuels, meaning they are non-renewable. A simple study of Economics will show that the less and less you get of a certain supply (Oil), providing the demand stays the same (which its not, its increasing!), the price will skyrocket gradually! This really has little to do with "Arab interests"!
I personally don't think the field is tilted against Arab oil interests at all. Oil companies that function over there (like Shell, etc) probably take anywhere from 40 to 80% of the revenue of the oil just because they installed refineries there!
... a car that runs on solar power, given that the intent of the tax is to pay for roads (maintenance, new construction, etc)?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sure, there are plenty of wealthy folks who drive urban assault vehicles and less affluent who still drive Geo sardine cans. Just because these numbers balance out in the final total doesn't make it fair.
.1%.
Thing is, the cost to make it fair would end up costing more than under the current unfair system. For example, if you switch to a GPS system, the cost of monitoring the system, making it tamper proof, etc... Runs up to the point that you'd have to double the effective tax rate in order to get the same amount of money out of it for the roads.
Tell that to the farmers who buy fuel for their tractors or the landscaping companies who pay gas taxes for the fuel in their lawnmowers, chainsaws, and weed eaters.
They usually don't pay the road taxes on that fuel. Farmers simply get their own tank somewhere on their property and pay to have untaxed(and dyed) diesel delivered. I've seen a number of trucks with a seperate fuel tank and pump in the bed for refueling the tractor in the field. The landscaping company can do the same thing. There are even forms to get the taxes reimbursed. If you're a user who uses 10 gallons a year on your yard, it's not worth the effort to get the $4 back. Otherwise there are methods.
I also note that you completely ignored the parent's question about electric cars.
Just like people who buy a hybrid or convert their vehicles to propane, veg. oil, or other alternative fuel of the week, it's currently not enough to statistically matter to the state. Nebraska charged one guy extra vehicle taxes to cover the reduced fuel usage, but that got shot down. Right now you could consider their reduced road tax charges as a subsidy for practical exploration into alternative fuels.
I'd guess that 99.9% of vehicles on the road today use either gasoline or diesel. It's generally not worth the money to go after the last
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not sure what the details of the various state laws are (IANAL). But as long as you pay the highway tax, you're in the clear. Many states exempt ethanol and various biofuel additives from this tax to encourage their use. For example, for E10 (10% ethanol), the ethanol portion is untaxed. Similar tax exemptions exist for biodiesel additives. I haven't seen where they have placed an upper limit on the biofuel additive concentration, so for E20, the 20% ethanol portion is tax free.
Just fill your vehicle with E99.9 (D99.9 or whatever they call the diesel version).
Have gnu, will travel.
The last time i bought a car - fall 2001 - it seemed the mileage figures for most cars where lower than those in the 80's. My friends and I where discussing this when he bought a diesel VW around that time. It seems that in 20 years of engineering advancements little went into providing useful fuel efficeincy to the consumer.
Fuel efficiency has increased, but that has been more than offset by increased horsepower and weight. I am have been wondering if that is due to supposed improved safety. Did the rise in SUV require cars too be more sturdy for crash tests? Or ist the increased mass a natural design for increased crash safety for passengers?
The current huge gas tanks don't seem to help the situation either. A 10 gallon tank was pretty good size for a passenger car back in the 70s and 80s, 14 gallon tank seemd average in 2001, but now it seems the average is up to 16 gallons.
Do car cruising ranges somehow figure in CAFE fleet calculations?
It's also chemically transformed via a methanol or ethanol catalyst/regeant.
I've read up on it(planning to buy a diesel), and what this guy was using would be referred to as SVO - Straight Vegetable Oil.
Biodiesel can, 99% of the time, be run in an unmodified diesel engine. SVO can't. Substantial fuel system modifications are required in order to run the stuff.
It does end up being lawyer territory though.
I don't read AC A human right
Actually, in Europe, they base gas mileage on liters used per 100 km; in other words, instead of looking at "miles per gallon", they look at "gallons per mile" or the metric equivalent.
I guess you didn't learn to read, fucktard. The original debate was the amount of oil that came from ARAB resources, not OPEC. Get a life.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Well, Odometers aren't 100% reliable. For example, the Odometer on my previous car ('87 BMW 3-series) froze at ~190k miles, and all the mechanics I asked said it would probably take a full replacement of the dash display to fix it (which is not cheap). And then, there's always the problem that it adds even more incentive to rewind the odometer, especially on cars that get a lot of mileage.
Not that I'd be in favor of a GPS based system. I'm just pointing out that there are at least a few good reasons not to want to use the odometer.
If you want to tax oil then tax oil, don't take a tax that is supposedly for road maintenance and construction and warp it into a private crusade.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
According to hobbes, the rich guy needs it much more.
Because once enough minimum wage guys lose everything, they will take the rich persons property and perhaps his life.
You have to keep people at a certain minimum level of prosperity and happiness.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Here's a thought:
Instead of taxing fuel, why not tax tires? We could tax them based on cost and provide a nominal tax break for used tires, such that:
New tires: X% of sale price
Used tires: (X/2)% of used sale price
This would have the following advantages:
1. Used tires would be a credible option for poorer people, so the tax would be less regressive.
2. All road-worthy motor vehicles require tires to operate. Most municipalities ban tracked vehicles on public roads since they tear up pavement. Since tire purchasing is directly proportional to the life of the tire, and since the life of a tire is directly proportional to the amount you use it (either in years or in mileage), this would serve as a "use tax" on roads, save for the rare person that buys a car and lets it sit for years at a time.
3. Larger tires are common on larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and cost more than smaller tires, so they would have a greater tax $-wise than smaller tires.
4. Older vehicles traditionally used smaller tires than newer vehicles, so someone putting tires on the '76 Ford LTD they drive out of desperation will pay less tax money than someone putting tires on their brand new Hummer H2, even though they get comparable gas mileage. This would further "progressivize" the tax.
Does it cost them any more to retrieve oil when there is a war going on?
Many times yes. They might have to evacuate a facility, hire guards, pay bribes, whatever.
Then why does the price go up every time something flairs up in an oil producing region?
Because world supply is tight and demand relatively inflexible. Flareups tends to result in production interuptions. But even before that point you get speculators buying up supply, driving up prices. This is somewhat good because it results in reserves to help prevent shortages(and even higher price increases) if the situation does result in interuppted production.
I don't read AC A human right
You have to realize that if ALL fuel is taxed then EVERY road is a TOLL road.
The tax is on gasoline not "fuel". Just because they use the gas tax to pay for infrastructure doesn't mean that all fuels are included. If they want vegetable oil to be taxed, they should change their law.
If you ride a bicycle down the same road are you also evading taxes?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
1. Used tires would be a credible option for poorer people, so the tax would be less regressive.
They'd be crucified. Tires are an important safety item. A 'new' tire is less likely to blow, go flat, hydroplane, or slip than an old bald tire.
All road-worthy motor vehicles require tires to operate. Most municipalities ban tracked vehicles on public roads since they tear up pavement. Since tire purchasing is directly proportional to the life of the tire, and since the life of a tire is directly proportional to the amount you use it (either in years or in mileage), this would serve as a "use tax" on roads, save for the rare person that buys a car and lets it sit for years at a time.
It'd also encourage driving on bald tires, which isn't good. Then there's the fact that there's literally an order of magnitude difference in tire lifespans. There are tires with tread warrenties that should last the life of the average car. I'll be doing good to get 30k out of my tires(I like high-traction tires, but they're softer).
Larger tires are common on larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and cost more than smaller tires, so they would have a greater tax $-wise than smaller tires.
It's perfectly possible to mount smaller tires on a vehicle, though it's likely to mess up the speed/distance meters. Again, safety issue, the vehicle was designed for a certain size tire.
Finally, it's too rare of an item. Gasoline taxes will generally hit the user weekly/monthly, while it could be two to three years before the tire tax hits. That's bad.
I don't read AC A human right
while i'll grant that the context of this discussion almost implies that you're talking about america, you forgot to state that those are -america's- top two sources. which might make sense, taking geographical proximity into account. however to show the top four sources (globally), you'd need an export table, not an import table. and, as a bit of a spoiler, canada isn't the world's leading oil exporter. nowhere near it.
The sign on the pump that I frequent says that 44 cents of each gallon goes towards fuel tax.
If I don't buy any of that gas, why should I still need to pay that fuel tax? That would be like
charging me sales tax on items I have not purchased.
Just goes to show you how bad it is in this country. Someone tries to do something good for the economy, the environment, and foreign export dependencies, and they get fined. I guess Bush is in OPEC's pockets too. I can't say I'm surprised, him being a Good 'Ole Boy from Texas after all.
I used to think that my friend who moved to Canada was kinda foolish for leaving the U.S. Now I envy him like crazy.
And they said zombies weren't real!
They should all die.
It's pretty easy to disconnect the speedo cable between inspections.
That's nice if you drive a car that was built in 1989.
For those of us who drive cars built in this century - cars that more often have sensors, computers and storage for mileage* - these systems are troubling.
*I shouldn't have to point out that when mileage-keeping systems are disconnected in modern cars...the car won't start or drive.
My car was built in 78, but I will try that on my wife's Tahoe.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
That would work if you also took into account the source of the electricity used in hybrids. Because do you know that the electricity that your car is using is produced by hydroelectric power stations or by coal power stations? If it is the latter, then you should be taxed for that as well, because hey - just because I use electricity does not mean I do not have carbon emissions. It just means that I have pushed the carbon emissions elsewhere, away from my car.
Those that may have relatively more carbon emissions through the car but relatively less carbon emissions overall should be treated accordingly.
I'd also like to see the cost of defending the Freedom of the Seas and access to the Persian Gulf put into the federal tax on gasoline, and ideally a uniform level of auto liability insurance as well so you only pay car insurance when you're actually _driving_ and there would be no more uninsured motorists.
Sounds like an awful lot of win to me, and the only folks who get screwed are the poor (who should be taking mass transit anyway) and SUV drivers (either phallic symbols or vehicles with lots of kids, whose schools I'm already subsidizing). I haven't even mentioned any sort of so-called global warming mitigation, largely because I believe that the current global warming craze is where all the Marxist pinkos went after their last pseudoscientific religion got debunked by the pimp hand of History. But turning the Arab lands back into a bunch of smelly, irrelevant migrant simpletons that are safe to ignore? I am all about that.
Actually, it's called libertarianism. Let people pay for what they use, waste or destroy. Although in the more reasonable cases, the two aren't necessarily all that far apart.
Singapore has all the automatic road taxes when the car goes under the bridges. Taxis are taxed heavily as well to offset the cost and considering a standard taxi driver in Singapore works 12/7 the Government makes out and the Taxi itself works 24/7. Of course, Singapore is also giving money to those giving birth to try and increase the population. Almost everyone lives in a government subsidized home.
Its still a GREAT place to visit.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Even better, what if he was using waste grease to power a generator to charge the batteries of his 100% electric car? What if he was using waste grease to generate electricity to heat/cool his home, cook, and BTW to plug in an electric car every so often?
I should clarify. Yes, it costs more where the war is, but not everywhere else. Having lived in Alberta, I know how happy most people living in an oil producing region are when a war breaks out. It means larger oil revenues, more jobs, and a general economic boom. I'm talking war in Iraq, happy in Texas sort of thing. I'm not suggesting people IN the war are either happy or in a better economic situation.
My point was that world supply is tight (or at the very least controlled) and the price is driven by demand. Consumers can only affect one of those two variables, and it isn't the supply one. So, I reiterate, I pay for the "demand inflexibility" of other people.
My understanding is that most hybrids do not, in fact, plug in.
Well, as previously noted, farmers don't have to pay the tax. Landscaping companies pass that cost on to customers, just like your local flower shop delivery van does--and if they're big enough where the gas tax actually constitutes a business expense, they can get a tax reimbursement for that lawnmower fuel.
As for home users, you pay perhaps $2 a year in gas taxes to cut your grass, if that. Creating a specific exemption for that would cost more than the money you'd save. There are also places with special pumps for non-automotive uses (these pumps are either labeled or positioned such that they're walk-up only).
In terms of recreational use, as in for boats and aircraft--boating fuel stations do not charge this tax (though they may levy local fees for waterway maintenance in its place) and you can apply for a rebate for aviation use. You can also apply for the rebate for boating use if you have a big enough boat that it has a tank you fill at the gas station and not fuel cells you fill at the dock.
As for electric cars, yes, they absolutely should be taxed for their use of the roadways. This is not a problem for today, though--various governments are making the cost of entry as low as possible for hybrid/electric vehicles, and that includes reduced or no "gas tax" for road maintenance. That burden is being shifted to all-fuel vehicles to subsidize them and provide another incentive to select a hybrid. Once people no longer require tax credits, rebate vouchers, and special treatment (e.g. free access to HOV/carpool lanes even with just one passenger), then the tax system will shift to compensate. This is because by that time, the number of fuel vehicles paying gas taxes will no longer be a sufficient tax base to pay for road maintenance. It all works out if you stop to think about it for a moment.
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But, it's much more effective the lower down the 'ladder of government' you are.
A few thousand emails in a day will definitely grab the attention of a state legislator.
And the nice thing about email is it's instant. If you have a good organization, you can very rapidly send a flood of email, and also very rapidly stop that flood of email.
Email is also better than phone calls because if you have 1,000 people call somebody, then you won't be able to get through yourself.
paintball
And it's amazing what a little tinfoil can do to a GPS system.
If I take my motorcycle to work I get 47 MPG but in my car I only get 28 MPG how long before they start varying the tax based on the vehicles mileage? This is just pathetic.
Ahem!
US Gallon == 8 US Pints
UK Gallon == 8 UK Pints
But, I hasten to add,
1 US Pint == 16 US Fluid Ounces
1 UK Pint == 20 UK Fluid Ounces
And furthermore,
1 US Fluid Ounce == 29.5735295625 milliliters
1 UK Fluid Ounce == 28.4130625 millilitres
So once you convert 1 US gallon and 1 UK gallon to SI units (giving respectively 3785.411784 ml and 4546.09 ml), you find that a UK gallon is a full 20% more than a US Gallon.
Beef
Just like what happened with some state cigarette taxes or funds from lawsuits that were earmarked for "smoking cession programs" and ended up being used for everything else.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Is "regressive tax" some sort of slang for "doesn't tax the rich enough?". I don't think I've ever heard it used that way before, and I've seen it about 5 times on this page.
Taxes are very seldom taken "for nothing", they are usually recycled into services for those who paid the taxes.
Unfortunately, once the government gets its hands on money, it generally loots it for other purposes than the one used to justify collecting it.
California's fuel taxes and tolls are particularly bad examples: Both the bridge funds and the fuel taxes have been looted to support politically-correct "transportation related" projects such as public mass transit systems (which, in northern CA, are so poorly organized that they're nearly useless).
In the case of the Bay Bridge this was so extreme that when it came time to do an earthquake retrofit there was nothing to do it with. So they raised the tolls on ALL the bridges in the area (most too far away for the traffic to be related) - by a factor of several - mainly to pay for the Bay Bridge work.
Caltrans in the SF bay area also deliberately takes a long time on road projects and otherwise impedes automobile traffic (and drastically lower its fuel efficiency as a side-effect) in an attempt to force drivers onto the impractically-designed public transit systems and "get them over their love affair with the automobile". (They admitted this when LA had repaired its own freeways after a major earthquake in a few months, while SF was still working on the Loma Prieta quake damage after years.)
This all got so bad that a ballot measure was written to try to earmark the gas taxes and tolls for road work a few years back. But it was poorly written and would have let much of the practices continue (and also got caught in some other state politics that distorted the turnout). It was narrowly defeated at the polls.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's what devices like FasTrak here in the Bay Area are for. You don't have to get your wallet out, you don't need to exchange money, it's all done electronically while you whiz past the checkpoint. And transit agencies, in an effort to reduce congestion caused by people slowing down to do it the old fashioned way, offer a discount on bridge tolls for FasTrak -- you'll be spending less money, not more.
Do they really though? Those numbers don't actually mean that your car really will get 26 MPG in the city, they mean that the car got 26MPG in a specific test, and testing standards have changed over the years. What is an advertised 26 MPG now may not have been the same as an advertised 26 MPG 15 years ago.
Yes, we have EZ-Pass in the east, which is the same thing. But you still have to slow down somewhat, and there's still a lot of infrastructure to pay for. I'd still rather pay more for my gas than worry about whether the they actually registered my Pass or if there's going to be a ticket in the mail.
heh heh heh
waste in... my... back end... entities
If I'm not mistaken, vehicles in Washington state are exempt from personal property tax (as in annual taxation). (The property tax system needs reformed, but that is another issue.)
We do pay I think $30 per vehicle to get tabs/tags/whatever-is-the-term.
We have a high gas tax I believe, yet we don't really have any tolls. I'm not sure if there currently are any. Some newly created things might get tolls (which brings up other issues as they want to have emergency vehicles, like firetrucks, to get past the toll).
So you're saying those who are sick and tired of being poor should just go out and get a higher paying job? Well, that sure seems like a sure fire way to solve poverty!
I think the solution is going to combine a variety of options.
First of all, all states are different, and although some states currently have tolls, some states tolls are an oddity if they were implemented. (It makes it worse when a state that lacks tolls decides to implement them and start charging firetrucks to use the toll.)
If tolls are going to be done, they should either be limited to paying for the construction of the road itself, or to pay for the upkeep of the road. Having a "free" day once a week should be done so people who cannot afford it can avoid it. Going even further, we might allow those living in poverty to bypass the toll by giving them a special sticker.
I prefer the concept of a car tax, voluntary as opposed to personal property taxes, done each year. We might exempt the first $5k of a vehicle's blue book value, and tax the excess at a given percentage. We might extend the exemption to $10k, limit one vehicle, for senior citizens who qualify based on income.
We might eliminate the gas tax, if we use the above idea, but it would have to be very progressive for that to happen.
But instead of eliminating the gas tax, we might simply eliminate it for residents only, meaning out-of-state drivers would pay it if their license plate isn't from within state. (So this idea combined both above, a gas tax for out-of-staters and a vehicle tax for in-staters who would pay no gas tax.)
Like a search for drugs, the police need permission to search for untaxed fuel don't they? So what happens if you refuse to allow them to dip your tank?
Concerning property taxes, I oppose residential property taxes. Residential property taxes don't factor in income, and I would rather see something progressive to take their place. Perhaps an income tax (which we don't have one in my state) to completely replace them. Or even an income state on interest and dividends only to help lower residential property tax by the take-in amount.
Which supports my real point, which is that calculating "who benefits more" is far too complicated to ever truly get right, and so probably shouldn't be the basis of our tax system.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Red diesel isn't taxed, the only use I've ever had for it is when the boiler ran out of fuel in the middle of the night!
It's also used for marine engines. For instance: Our little sailboat has an auxiliary diesel engine we use to get it in and out of the dock, or as an emergency backup for wind-propulsion problems. It burns no-road-tax dyed diesel fuel from a station at a marina.
We only go through a galon a year or less. But power boats, larger sailboats with auxiliaries, and commercial shipping can go through a LOT. No point in road-taxing them. Most won't even fit on a trailer. Especially the big liners, ferries, container ships, and tankers. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
States compete for tourism, for companies, for federal grants and resources, etc... Boeing recently moved to Chicago (well, not QUITE so recently) and cities and states were actively competing by giving tax breaks promising land, etc... Its been played out over and over with more than just Boeing.
States are like siblings, they have a rivalry. Sure, somebody might not pack it in and head to SC over this, but it does matter in the long run. Right NOW, the impact is intangible.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Note that I'm not saying the current system of gasoline taxes isn't practical or even reasonable, only arguing with an earlier poster who claimed it was amazingly fair.
Just curious, how is it better not to have yearly safety inspections?
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
Personal property taxes generally are not applied to roads. The biggest component of most personal property tax is the levy for your local school district. There are also levies for rural fire departments, ambulance services, mental health facilities, and occasionally a special road district. If you aren't paying for these with personal property tax, you are probably paying them with real estate taxes or sales tax.
Sales tax also rarely goes to roads. Indirectly it might be allocated from the general budget. The only common tax that is truly for roads are the fuel taxes.
BTW, Missouri also went to a 6 year license a few years back. And while technically you are supposed to change your license when you move, I wonder how many people actually do. And if you buy two year tags for your car, you only need an inspection every two years. Frankly, I've seen what passes for cars in some states that don't have required inspections, and I'm happy Missouri still does. Even if I do have to take vacation time to get my motorcycle inspected.
Missouri doesn't have toll roads, with the exception of a few local bridges and expressways. While tolls are a direct use tax, it's much more convenient to pay fuel tax than it is to fish for change on a toll road.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
How does the state distinguish between an innocent mistake and a calculated evasion of the tax laws?
Consider the weight of the vehicle? Heavier vehicles tend to use more fuel - thus pay more in road taxes.
As for annual miles, what about miles driven out of state, off road, or even on privately maintained roads(such as the local racetrack)? That's where the GPS proposal came from, but not only is that expensive and subversible, but it also has a very high possibility of violating privacy.
only the assertion that it is unbelievably fair.
Compared to most taxes, it is. Most toll roads, for example, charge a flat rate whether you drive a sub-compact such as the geo metro or a H1. A fleet of H1's will break down a road far faster than the same number of geos.
I won't say it's 100% fair, just that it comes pretty close to the way I like a tax: It's simple, upfront, fairly fair, encourages conservation of gasoline(and therefore oil), doesn't violate privacy, gives a slight subsidy towards alternate fuel use, etc...
Sure, if we start looking at going to even 10% electric cars it might be time to figure something else out, but until then it's good enough. If any alternate liquid fuels such as biodiesel or ethanol even start approaching 10%, I'm sure they'll be served up by standard gasoline stations and the tax can be collected. I don't see home brewers ever being a significant source of those. Sure, it can be done, but there's the whole matter of scale and convienence. Home brewing of either biodiesel or ethanol requires thousands of dollars of equipment*, enough space for the equipment such as several 30 gallon tanks, practice and supplies. It's much easier to pull into a refilling station and swipe the credit card.
Home charge electric would be a tough one though. Maybe a odometer charge on that one; I doubt many electric vehicles will be going on regular interstate journeys anytime soon.
*discounting creative scrounging, of course.
I don't read AC A human right
In short, a man was home brewing his own biodiesel from grease. (Yes, it is possible. But do not approach it lightly, as caustic chemicals such as methanol and NaOH are involved.) Somehow, the state Dept. of Revenue got wind of his activities, and fined him for not paying road tax. Alas, it is a legitimate tax, as he used his homemade biodiesel in his car.
What I will work on through the Milwaukee Biodiesel Co-op (shiny new site coming at RSN) is to bring the state tax policy in line with the federal government's. Currently, the IRS does not tax on homemade fuel produced in quantities below 500 gallons. Go over, and they want their cash. The State of Wisconsin, however, does not have any ceiling above which they tax. That is to say, they will tax any and all fuel you make. We will be working with some allies in the state legislature on this.
While I want to help my colleagues who make homebrew, at the same time, I want to help the state recover from its Thompson-legacy budget deficits. And alas, tax revenue is about the only way out of that.
(Imagine, if they passed TABOR here as the Republicans have tried and tried (and failed each time)... I would have to get a state referendum on it! blech.)
In other news, my Volkswagen Jetta TDI is the single best car I've ever had. It gets 49.9 miles per gallon on the highway! According to the trip meter, I'm at 400 miles with one-quarter of a tank remaining. And it's running 100% biodiesel -- all taxes paid. Hells yes!
-- haaz.
To some extent, you want people with old cars to be hit with the tax if you are trying to discourage driving in fuel-inefficient cars. You want to shift the balance of the decision towards buying the new, efficient car, and you can either subsidize their purchase (which would be a nightmare) or penalize their use of gas. Gas taxes are a much better solution for paying for roads, because they tax all driving, and I seriously doubt that most people are driving on private roads. Taxes are multipurpose and sometimes driven by cross-purposes. They are there to maintain the roads. They can also be used to discourage driving, encourage higher density living, and encourage the use of alternative transit. They can also act as a proxy for making people pay somewhat for all that "free" parking that the city provides for cars. If you are against taxes, you should take into account the benefits you receive from government and see if you would prefer to be charged by private entities (like parking on NYC streets which they should charge a fortune for but remains free).
I'd declare fairness states that the person who benefits most from the roads would pay the most in (road) taxes.
Well, none of the other taxes go like that, so why should this one. Take defense. We spend over $500 billion a year on defense. What is the benefit to the poor people? I'd argue nothing. A homeless person will be homeless if invaded. The lower class workers may have new bosses, but someone will still be sweeping up the government halls. So, who does benefit? People like Bill Gates. His money would be gone if someone took over the US and nationalized his assets. Do that to a homeless person and see if he even notices. Taxes are not now and have never been fair. I think that complaining about "fair" when dealing with taxes is like complaining about "wet" when dealing with water.
Learn to love Alaska
Hybrids always use traditional fuels. In theory they could be built to use liquefied coal, but they can only produce diesel fuel.
/far/ less efficient and result in greater market instability.
Assuming that you're talking about charging an electric car from the grid, then your monthly bill would reflect the carbon emissions used to generate it because in the case of electric distribution of energy, all of the generating sources would be responsible for paying the tax. They are currently monitored for emissions already, so there would be very little paperwork involved. Compare this to carbon trading, which would be
And that's not far from the truth. Our neighbor has two vehicles that run on used cooking oil....a Mercedes sedan and a pickup truck, and if you get behind either vehicle it smells not unlike a bad chinese takeout place.
A carbon tax would go to a separate fund, just like social security. The difference is that it would be distributed in full every year. It would be /illegal/ to use this money for any other purpose. Compare this to state and city taxes on cigarettes, which were never intended to be paid out to citizens directly. Just because our politicians have a propensity to subsidize special interests, doesn't mean we should abandon legislation because it could eventually be subverted. You could say the same thing about any bill.
They don't tax moonshine in NC. They don't tax homemade beer and wine. However, if you want to help the trade deficit, pay up. It is absurd that the federal government would also fine him. It scares me how monfocused government bureaucrats can be. Laws without compassion are tyranny.
Plus this story is running on top NC 14 News shown in Raleigh/Durham, Greensboro and Charlotte every 30 minutes. And the story was in the Greensboro and Winston-Salem newspapers. Plus the story was talked about by FM Talk 101 and the Neal Bortz show. And it was on Fark.com. Oh, I think the press coverage is fine.
My understanding is that most people who support a carbon tax believe that the revenues should be spread equally to each taxpayer at the federal level, and that the money received by the tax would be remain independent from other taxs. Rich people tend to consume more carbon than poor people, so unless your friends use much more energy than the average American of their income level, they will come out ahead with a carbon tax. That's the beauty of it.
It's also important to note that the restrictions on the energy efficiency of appliances do raise the cost of goods, though not necessarily the total cost of ownership. There was a story on slashdot about a proposal in Australia to ban incandesent bulbs (http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/02/20/1632 204.shtml). Regardless of the cost to the average consumer, this bill presumes that the state should outlaw all bulbs of a certain type rather than simply creating incentives that are aimed directly at reducing emissions. Economists have studied short and long-term effects of price elasticity for different types of energy consumption in different sectors. It doesn't matter how we reduce our emissions, only that we do so in a manner that we know will make a substantial difference in the short and long-term.
Lowering the taxes on companies that sold clean energy or technologies which produce or use clean energy is another legislative tool to reduce carbon emissions. I think its a good idea that has disadvantages. Would you consider hydrogen fuel to be clean? It could be, but it currently relies on the grid which consists of a lot of carbon emitters. What about ethanol? It seems clean, but its not clear how much energy (and money) is needed to produce it in the first place, esp. given the crazy farm bill subsidies. What about solar panels? Do you consider the costs to produce the panel? This isn't to say that the government should never support certain technologies, but you have to consider how difficult it is to craft a bill that addresses these sorts of issues without adding too much complexity or having difficulty getting political support without calls to amend an already complex bill to support certain industries. I personally think that the best ways for the government to support the reduction in greenhouse emissions is by doing things that the private sector cannot, or would have trouble getting started. A primary example would a modern rail system, or helping support a pilot public transportation technology. We all know that if companies sell cars that use less gasoline, they will sell (esp. with the carbon tax), but it is a difficult business proposition to invest in the rail system in America when it seems that most Americans have no choice but to drive or fly (with minor exceptions on the east coast).
Let's limit the discussion to income tax vs. consumption tax on a Federal level.
One way to look at this is the way that mortgage companies look at it: you WILL spend 2/3 of your net income, and you'll only have 1/3 of it left for mortgage + taxes + insurance. They enforce this ratio no matter how much money you make (maybe the ratio has changed since I applied for a mortgage, but whatever new ratio they've settled on is irrelevant to the argument). I found their assumption of spending rate incredible (it certainly didn't and doesn't apply to me), but they're probably right; that's probably how most people live, and the overall pathetic savings statistics for Americans back them up. So if we all are spending 2/3 of our net income, and that 2/3 of net is VAT'd at the same rate, then simple algebra says everyone pays the same percentage of income in taxes, and VAT is not regressive.
Which means the car example from before is not realistic. If person A buys a car for $20,000, and person B who makes 10 times more buys a car for $60,000, so what -- you can't compare the tax on the cars. You have to compare the tax on the total spending of the two individuals. The mortgage broker predicts that they'll both spend the same percentage of net income. If you believe the mortgage broker, you must also believe that they will pay the same percentage of income in VAT.
As far as reforming the income tax system to make it truly progressive, Americans have shown they're unwilling to support that, or at least unwilling to mobilize sufficiently to overcome the lobbying of the rich.
Except aren't the newer cars LESS fuel efficient? I know my new 2005 Mazda3 gets between 26 MPG city and 32 MPG highway, and my parent's old 1987 Omni got something like 29 city/35 highway - and at times as high as 40 in its less fuel efficient days. I'm also aware my their 1983 Celebrity was at least as good as my Mazda3. So I have a hard time finding that something with a "clunker from the 1980's" is getting worse mileage than newer vehicles.
I was about to say something similar. Mileage of for the fleet of vehicles on the road peaked back in 1988. There seems to be plenty of old Civics and Camrys out there from the 1980's that simply keep going. There is no reason that a poor person who needs some kind of vehicle to get stuck with a low mileage clunker.
These taxes and fines only strengthen their potential monopoly by closing out a free market (not a huge fan of that ideal either).
The Free Market: When it's good it's very, very good. But when it's bad it's horrid.
1. Don't put a sticker on a vehicle advertizing what it runs on, especially if it wouldn't be obvious otherwise.
2. States usually have dumb laws and regulations that aren't advertized, well known, or obvious.
3. These things don't always benefit the average citizen.
Other questions...
What does a state collect with a 5% tax, if the fuel itself costs $0? (Waste cooking oil?)
Why are there vehicle registration/licence fees and tolls if the gas tax is supposed to be paying for roads?
What would the effect be if everyone with gas powered lawn mowers, chainsaws, weed whackers be if everybody logged their gas usage and applied for that $2 refund during tax time?
Just because our politicians have a propensity to subsidize special interests, doesn't mean we should abandon legislation because it could eventually be subverted. You could say the same thing about any bill.
Actually, that is a pretty good reason to keep govt. out things except when absolutely necessary. The government that governs least governs best.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Let's talk about global warming, since that's where this thread started. It may not seem 'absolutely necessary' to some people for the government t act. However, most reasonable people believe that it is a problem and will be a much larger problem if we don't act now to mitigate future effects. Would you argue that the individuals though goodwill and best business practices can address this? No, obviously the only way to address this is through the government.
I think most people would agree that when the government attempts to solve a problem it should aim for a simpler approach. My first post in this discussion was an endorsement of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which would be a far more efficient way of attacking the problem of greenhouse emissions than just putting money into hydrogen fuel technology or ethanol.
It's easy to feel like the government can't do anything well when we tolerate leaders who feel the same way. I'm sure there are millions of people who may say that they agree with that statement, but they each have a different view on what is an absolute necessity. It's a fine principal, but when take to the extreme doesn't allow for a reasoned comparison between the private and public sector approach to providing goods and services.
Won't start or drive? Umm, no sorry - FUD.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Ohnoez! Expanded conversation to include relevant topic!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.................
God you're dumb. How did you make it through school?
Theoretically there are ways to get rid of the dyes. One possibility is to use an activated carbon. During WW2, when British avgas for war planes was dyed and there were occassional road checkpoints, the staff of the airports was routinely "borrowing" such fuel and removing the dye by pouring it through a gas mask filter.
Other possibilities are using biotechnology (see the patents related to cleaning effluent waters from manufacture/dyeing of textiles, maybe there are some bugs able to live on the water/oil boundary and eat preferentially the dye), or selective dissociation of the diazo bond with laser pulses or microwaves tuned to its absorption band... Or the plain old fractional distillation, if we can live with associated loss of some fuel additives.
For home heating, spent transformer oil can be reportedly used as well. It burns hotter than regular oil, though, and is more difficult to ignite.
One thing to keep in mind: The cars are computers. We are hackers.
So it won't be so easy, but as long as the signals from the sensors are not fully encrypted and authenticated, they may be simulated with a $2 microcontroller - the issue here is to make the engine control unit think that the mile tracker is connected, and convince the mile tracker that the car is not moving. With full encryption, it may be easier to entirely replace the engine control electronics - or use a less hostile model of a car.
1) If it is technology, it can be hacked.
2) Everything is a form of technology.
People who qualify for exemptions certainly get them. If the one standing complaint you have is that people cough up a dollar a year because their lawn mowers also run on gas, well then I think that merely goes to show you that the system is pretty damn good. If you were really, truly, upset by that annual buck or two, you could, when filling your gas can, pay in cash and in advance and ask that you not be charged the taxes on the can since it is not for interstate use. Your local gas attendant might be too stupid/lazy to do that, but that is entirely irrelevant to the point. You can get that 30 cents if you really, truly, desperately want it.
Fair enough. :)
In my defense I did say that I wouldn't favor a GPS based approach (which was really just a nice way of saying I'd be against it), just that there were certainly problems with "Why not use the odometer?" as the parent of my first post said.
Honestly, I don't see a more reliable way to tax road use (short of making every road a toll road), and most methods run into significant problems in the deployment phase. I think that the "Tax at the pump" system is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.
Your heating oil and diesel fuel difference isn't all that much. They take more of the sulfur out of the K1 and use additives to replace the lowered amounts in current diesel. The idea behind the dye is that there are machines that don't touch the road at all. This fuel gets an off road designation. The dye stains the inside of the fuel tanks and it will take several full tanks ran through in order to not notice the dye.
The dye does server several purposes, one is to catch someone using the non taxed version as regular fuel. However, at a station, they would have to keep record and report the tax on the volume sold. I don't think it is like tobacco where the tax is applied as it leaved the factory and the retailer has to pay it up front. It might be in some situations though. Another reason is so the driver doesn't accidentally fill up with the wrong stuff. Some job sites with heavy equipment and dump trucks will have tanks there and if the driver see the wrong color, he knows he made a mistake of some sorts. After IFTA (International Fuel Tax Agreement) was instituted, using off road fuel for refer units on trucks and off road vehicles isn't much of a issue any more. You are starting to see less and less of them off road fuel pumps except on private land. The K1 pumps are mandated to have a short enough hose and an obstacle the prevents the nozzle from reaching a vehicles tank.
They take that tax seriously. It is supposed to be used for the roads but get used on so many other projects that have nothing to do with a road it would baffle you. You can look at your states website and find information about IFTA reporting. It is how many miles driven or reported as driven in the state and a reference for the funds expected to them. Divide those miles by five (they assume five miles to the gallon for IFTA usage) and then multiply by the state portion of the fuel tax. Then look at the states road budget, you will be amazed at how short it is. And yes, the road budget should list project funding for cities and counties they give the money too. Almost half of the collected funds are gone and this doesn't even account for the federal fuel tax that gets reapportioned back to the states.
There is a big difference. Having bumper stickers telling people you are running on vegetable oil is "political action": it's letting people know that the car isn't dependent on foreign oil. You probably don't have the attitude that your mods should be adopted by other people to help save the environment or reduce dependence on oil.
Your calculations of how much damage a truck does to the road are likely flawed. While this would be true of point masses, the same doesn't hold true with cars. An 8000 lb car with 4 axles won't do 4 times as much damage as a single 4000lb car with 2 axles. Otherwise, 2 cars driving next to each other would do 4 times the damage to the road as a single car. Splitting the load up across multiple axles makes a huge huge difference. Also, the cost of using the road isn't solely wear on the road, but also how much added "congestion" the vehicle adds to the road, and how likely they are to get in accidents. Of course, we can't really factor those things easily into the gas tax.
Phil
close to 100% or more of all income $$$$ taxes collected by US GOVT is spent back to pay the banks back.
So if those clowns had the forsight to have no debt, no one would need to pay personal taxes, only corporations would need to pay as they do.
But it doesnt matter, eventually, close to 100% of a $100 bill gets back to the govt, as each transaction/collection/transfer gets
its small piece. It just happens quicker and in larger chunks if taxes are high, but if they are low, they get
to pass through more hands to benefit more. Eventually the govt will get it. (All that imported oil is paid by debt, not local dollars)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Don't forget that some people have vehicles mostly dedicated to off road excursions. To tax them for road usage based on odometer would be incorrect unless one provides a method of exemption or the lawmakers decide that wear and tear on the environment is just as costly to the public as road usage.
A fine idea, but you lack my cynicism when it comes to the government. I don't like the idea of wealth redistribution, nor do I trust the government to give up money once they get it. For example, the New York State Thruway was set up as a toll road initially with the stated intention of removing those tolls once the NYS government recuperated the costs of building it; to pay off the construction bonds and their interest. That's great, but the bonds were all paid back over 15 years ago, and the tolls have gone up several times since then. Now they say the money is for maintenance, but they get Federal Highway funds for that. Of course, where to the Federal Highway funds come from; the gasoline and diesel taxes. So, not only are high energy users currently being taxed for their higher energy usage, but the wealth is already being redistributed in the form of those Federal Highway funds. In the meantime, the NYS government won't live up to their agreement, and by extension, I doubt this new "carbon tax" would be either.
I should also point out that I don't believe that GW is caused by human activity. I do; however, think that burning fossil fuels is a bad idea thanks to all the other things that come out of a tail pipe/smoke stack when you burn them. By that rationale, natural gas is better than oil, which is better than coal. Nuclear, well, it's kind of in the middle in my mind.
Your basic argument is that the best idea is to lower human energy consumption. I'm completely against that. I think the best way to clean the environment is to increase affluence of all people. Then they can afford things like the Clean Air Act that we have and China desperately needs!
Without the need of a carbon tax, Congress could simply increase CAFE to get that increase in fuel economy. That would have the same end, and probably increase the cost of vehicles, having the effect you want without raising taxes.
Your idea of more rails wouldn't work. Amtrack is run by the government and it's crap. Even the Acela trains have problems, and even with the hassle of flying these days, it's still cheaper to fly. The US is simply too spread out to be effective. Our suburbs, in the North East and it's only worse in the rest of the country, are too spread out for them to be effective. They work in densely populated areas for that reason, but most of the country is not. The cost of the infrastructure, materials and energy and maintenance, let alone construction would out weigh the savings of people driving less. The better option would be more efficient cars and better energy sources. Personally, I'm betting on those algae to bio-diesel and algae to hydrocarbons that several folks I keep reading about are working on. For the record, I agree that money and subsidies spent on ethanol is a waste, and I am against that as well. As for solar energy, I did make simple solar panels in college, and as I've read recently, the ones made in the last few years generate more power than was required to make them when used in areas with average to above average numbers of clear days; to include resource gathering; mining, etc. Wind, as I understand, has already passed that threshold as well, which is why I pay extra to buy all my electricity from wind. Still, although I in effect pay this carbon tax you speak of, it's my choice. I can afford it, and I choose to do it in support of the technology. My big problem is FORCING people to do it, when at least in NYS, they all have the opportunity to do it now.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
It really gets me going when I see "poor" people who wear shoes that cost $250 and, and have $300 cell phones and then complain how they are poor and need more welfare money. I want to approach them and tell them that the reason they are poor is that they keep spending the money they have on non-essential crap instead of saving it or investing it somehow. But then again if half of the poor would be smarter and more educated they wouldn't be poor probably. I understand that a good number of them might not have a chance but the other part just chose to lead this lifestyle, and thus they shouldn't complain and not make everyone else pay for their stuff through welfare.
I'll defer to your comments that it is the weather when it comes to freeways and interstates in areas that freeze. Of course those tend to be built to specs that allow for heavy tractor trailers and related loads. And freeways/interstates tend to have anything resembling potholes filled VERY quickly. (You did put in the disclaimer about freeways and interstates.)
On so called surface streets, the quality of roadway varies greatly. There you will run into instances where weather, variable soil conditions, overweight vehicles, poor quality paving, utility upgrades, studded tires and a variety of other things all contribute to wear and tear. You can't claim that it is just one thing. You have to look at the whole picture and determine what percent of the wear and tear comes from what source. And that may vary by location, season and load.
In Canada, fuel stations in rural areas have two diesel pumps: for highway and off-highway (i.e. farm) use. The untaxed farm diesel is dyed purple and the taxed highway diesel is clear. And yes, there are major fines if you get caught with clear diesel in a non-farm vehicle. Although I have heard a few (probably false) stories of how use sunlight and clear containers to destroy the dye.
Around here, logging trucks and coal trucks destroy our roads but absolutely do not pay their fair share in highway maintenance taxes.
At least in most areas serious commercial trucks are under a different level of scrutiny - It should be possible to make them keep logbooks, visit weigh stations in order to make up the difference.
Like I said - while not entirely fair - I think that it strikes a good balance between fairness and effectivness of collection. To get it fairer would likely require so much more in collection and enforement costs that even people getting a raw deal under the current system would end up paying more.
I don't read AC A human right
The basic issue is that he was fined for not paying a tax which he owed. The question you asked was how that tax should be collected from vehicles not using a gasoline pump.
The fairness of the tax system is not at issue. The fact of the matter is that the gasoline tax is for road maintenance. Everyone owes it, and everyone should be expected to pay for it. The fact that the tax is scalar to the degree which the roads are used makes it one of the more fair taxes on the books. How is being charged for your usage of the roads at the estimated rate you use it less fair than the current system? Electric cars are currently being paid for by everyone else because they don't pay the tax. That isn't fair at all.
Perhaps next time you could bother to to read the sentences you quote in the future. I said I wasn't getting into an argument about the fairness of taxation in general or the inconsistencies of enforcement in tax collection. Obviously that didn't click.
I was merely trying to head off what I perceived to be a slippery slope toward a bunch of the rabid kind of libertarians coming in to bitch about how taxes shouldn't be collected from anyone, and people who avoid "the system" are some kind of heroes.
I love your last part though. You sound like you are espousing the status quo. You are happy in the way things are and don't want anything to change. Maybe it isn't I who should take off the foil hat and move outside, but it is you who should plug in a lamp, blow out that candle, and look to see that the world has changed in the past 200 years and even in the past 100 years since the early days of the automobile.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
It must really suck to make what you thought was a good point, only to have it eviscerated like your just was.
As to this
"but try finding it in a rural area that isn't a huge agricultural region. I live in an area..."
I don't know how you'd know whether it was available around you or not seeing as how you didn't know it was available AT ALL til GP just educated you. Don't try and lie and pretend you did. And frankly, no one cares about your anecdotal evidence.
"Industrial agriculture does not. I live in an area with lots of smaller family farms and there isn't a single "farm use only" diesel pump."
Because they have access to delivery of fuel directly to their farm, which they probably take advantage of as necessary.
Your ignorance of the methods involved does not mean that you have a point, it only means you're speaking from ignorance.
"only arguing with an earlier poster who claimed it was amazingly fair."
Nobody EVER said ANYWHERE it was "amazingly fair". You are a liar.
"My argument was with the post to which I originally replied."
Which would be mine. Which NOWHERE claimed ANYTHING about ANY kind of FAIRNESS in any SHAPE, FORM, or FASHION.
What you were really making an argument against was your invented strawmen.
If you plan to reply, quote EXACTLY where I said anything about "fair" or don't bother.
Well, let's see. I want highways, and roads. That's pretty essential to me. If you are suggesting privatizing all that then I would challenge you to find evidence that the system would be better than it already is and more efficient (cost wise). The reason things are public is because these things should be owned by the people.
It's easy to say "why not use toll roads?" but an easier question to ask is "Why not just use what's already in place that works just fine?" I personally don't like toll roads because it's expensive. The only toll road I've used costs $1 or so for every couple of miles. The cost of gas where I live is $3.50. How much is the taxes half? so say it's 2.00 for 20 miles to make the math easy, it's still cheaper than the toll road. That's even rounding in the toll road's favor for all the uncertainty!
Yes, but is it not a tad bit ironic that the government and politicians are trying to push for cleaner vehicles and helping the environment, while at the same time enforcing tax laws that are restrictive on individuals and make it nearly impossible for them to achieve these goals. A) "The government" is not one person. Specifically, the politicians are mostly in the legislative branch, and fall on either side of the isle, and the executive branch enforces the laws.B) Taxes tax good citizens and bad citizens. The government taxes activities it wants to encourage and discourage. If anything, this argument "if you had an electric vehicle you would not be paying gas taxes and might still be using highways and other roadways." shows that the tax law is working in both ways.
You are happy in the way things are and don't want anything to change. Maybe it isn't I who should take off the foil hat and move outside, but it is you who should plug in a lamp, blow out that candle, and look to see that the world has changed in the past 200 years and even in the past 100 years since the early days of the automobile.If there really was some sort of injustice, which I don't believe there is, it would be so far on the bottom of my list of things to worry about. Don't you think there are better directions for politics to go then to amend this type of tax law across the whole country so that a very small minority doesn't get a tax break or gets taxed more? I think a few thousand dollars to one guy is not going to kill anyone. Meanwhile, I'll spend my time doing useful things, like replying to people with different opinions than me on the internet. Ok, so I can see the irony in that... For the record, my lamp already has a fluorescent bulb, and is currently in the off state, which is a sign of change based on the new problems facing me now.
My point is that most people use gasoline in their cars. Most cars use the roads to burn that gasoline. If you want a simple way to pay for roads, doesn't it make sense to tax gasoline? Seems like a good enough concept to get enough of the population to agree on it. This is a non issue. The usefulness of this article is to show people that bio-diesel is taxed just like gasoline.
Leading off with insults, always a winner. Sorry, I thought of it as leading off with a joke. I didn't think the foil hat thing would be offensive to you.Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I'd like to propose a horn honking tax. A really high one. You get a certain number of seconds per year for free for safety reasons and after that you pay for it. Big time. That way, we can shift a portion of the tax burden over to extremely unlikeable individuals.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
And each year I'm reminded why I hate summer vacation. It is amazing to see how juvenile and petty comments get as you kids get out of school.
"Rich" is being able to afford to live close enough to a city to benefit from its commerce, but far enough not to be ill-affected when it is nuked (see http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html/) . "Rich" is being able to afford a nice enough house that some developer can't bribe the town into eminent domain abuse.
Q: How is combatting outsourcing like installing a timing chain?
A: Line up the dots and use the tool that goes 'click'...
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Heh, interesting definition of rich. In many areas it seems that the rich try to move into the very areas a terrorist would target a nuke at - just look at condo prices in NYC.
Though yeah, eminent domain abuse is bad. It's one thing to ED homes for a school, highway, or military base. Still, it should be a last choice option - I wouldn't object to a rule stating that a ED purchase is required to pay double of appraised value, 150% of equivalent replacement, in addition to moving costs. Still not too expensive to take honestly condemned or blighted property, but enough to make them think twice about trying to ED the lower-middle class neighborhood in favor of selling it to a developer in order to build a shopping mall or condo complex.
I don't read AC A human right
So the food you eat before you lounge around or see a movie should be very cheap because you're not using it's energy to benefit you financially, but the food you eat before you go to work should be more expensive.
You're on a slippery slope, the gas tax as it is (like a usage tax) seems to be a pretty good compromise.
Of course, if I ride my biofueled horse, I should be taxed. After all the hooves damage the road, and there is a nasty cleanup situation every few miles. So, I need a GPS, since Flicka doesn't have an odometer. Now, a lot of those 'roads' were trails way back before we had taxes, so I guess we are paying for the improvements. Roads were built to improve commerce, to allow the farmer to get the product to the market, to allow the buyer and seller to meet. Now we tax everything under the sun, and talking about a sun tax, too. A some point, which I think has been passed, it became ridiculous. Taxes to a government are like drugs to a junkie. Need to put government in rehab.
"If you look back up the thread, you'll find the actual comment I referenced:"
No, I won't because it doesn't exist. No one ever said the current situation is "amazingly fair" but you claimed they did. Back it up or shut you lying fucking mouth.
"You have no idea where I live or what the farmers here do, yet are willing to claim you know more about them than I. For the record, you are exactly wrong."
First, you've lied several times already. You're lying now. Second, I know what FARMERS do, so save that retarded "you don;t know me" shit for someone who isn't me. I know WAY more about farms, farmers and farming than you ever will.
Back you lie up or admit you can't. Stop calling others trolls for making it clear that you're a liar.
I was right. So call me juvenile, call me petty, YOU'RE THE LOSER WHO HAS TO LIE ON A WEB BOARD TO IMPROVE HIS SELF ESTEEM.
How fucking sad are you?
And you never addressed how GP owned your lying ass. Because YOU CAN'T.
Shut your lying mouth now.
Flamebait? So a typical large vehicle doesn't pollute more than a typical small vehicle? Oh. My bad.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
"I like to lie"
FYP
Many services are cheaper for individuals than businesses, including electricity in some places. And come now, do you honestly believe that a more progressive tax on gas has any chance of leading to food being taxed more before leisure? If you want to make a "slippery slope" argument, you have to come up with something a little more believable.
Honestly, I'm not particularly opposed to a flat tax on gas, as long as it continues to be offset by a progressive income tax. I just quibbled with the OP's assertion that there was only one "fair" way to look at it.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
I rent for a reason. I don't trust the real estate market nor the job market. All that is needed is one Boom & Shroom[MR] and values will tank posthaste. I am looking at a household income map of northern New Jersey. I see pockets of "poverty" in Newark, Paterson and Trenton. Nice places for a biological attack to clear out the underachievers. The wealthy will be protected in their fortresses (gated communities) while pestilence kills off the slackers. Eminent DOOMain by Ebola, Marburg, H5N1, etc.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Even renting you could still become a problem; kicking people out of their (rented) homes is still unpopular.
I don't read AC A human right
Sure can:
m ent/wm1074.cfmo rums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php?t=247n ol.htmlhttp://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/27 /061127ta_talk_surowiecki. htmlr azil_cx_1116energy_adams.html
. htmh icles.pdf [Warning: PDF]
.pdf files and things you can pour over if you research the topic via Google, local library, watch CSpan, etc.
Sugar Ethanol
http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnviron
http://forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php?t=247http://f
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/sugar-etha
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/03/tax_gasoline_im
http://www.iags.org/es82905.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2005/11/15/energy-ethanol-b
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8769619/site/newsweek
(there are tons more links all over)
USA Gas Mileage Standards:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/cafe/overview
http://zfacts.com/p/414.html
http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/FEG2007_GasolineVe
There are tons and tons and tons of links, data, charts,
And to the AC earlier: Yes, corn farmers helped influence the decision, as did domestic sugar producers, but, oil companies are also to blame for this, as they don't want competition from ethanol PERIOD.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Too bad you can't tell the truth. I'll take a typo over your problem any day.
x7 and counting
x8 and counting
x10 and still a liar
starkruzr, I read about you here and your reprehensible behavior noted here:
t icleid=41095&cpage=208#feedbackAnchor
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?ar
You are disgraceful! So is your friend and fellow arstechnica member, Jeremy Reimer.