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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!
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
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No Joke! Rent solar power and fix your electric rates for 25 years: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Mod parent down, completely untrue on the measure/fine part.
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.
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.
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.