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Oregon Governor Proposes Vehicle Mileage Tax
tiedyejeremy writes "As covered by the Crosscut Blog, the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is proposing a change in the funding of the Oregonian transportation system that drops gasoline taxes and, by way of GPS tracking, taxes the number of miles driven, to the tune of 1.2 cents per mile. The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded. The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT official, James Whitty. I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis."
Except for the part where they leave the gas tax in place.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I thought encouraging fuel efficiency is a good thing?
Freelance Web Designer - Portfolio
and for everyone else who drives into Oregon, works in Oregon and gets taxed already on income, and anyone else who has a stake in Oregon, get ready to BEND OVER!
So much for cheaper driving with Hybrids as well!
Why just use the fancy new technology called an odometer? Check it every time you renew your registration and collect the fees at that time.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
is the new American way of life!
no revolution here folks, nothing to see here.
welcome to 1984, orwell is calling. if they are tracking you milage by gps, how much of a stretch is it say the also know exactly where you are, all the time. visit the bar on probation, tha'ts a spankin'. and plenty of other ways your privacy will be broken. no thanks.
And Jeremy Bentham, but who the hell remembers him? And now, here's how to rock:
Electric Eye by Judas Priest
Up here in space
Im looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think youve private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
Im watching all the time
Im made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
Im elected electric spy
Im protected electric eye
Always in focus
You cant feel my stare
I zoom into you
You dont know Im there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove
Im made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
Im elected electric spy
Im protected electric eye
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
Theres nothing you can do about it
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows
Im made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
Im elected electric spy
Im protected electric eye
Protected. detective. electric eye
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
It seems to me that if you tax a staple good, and people will be consuming less of that staple good due to an increase in efficiency... meaning you'll bring in less money from those taxes...
Then you raise the tax. What's the downside? It's not like people are going to consume less gas if the tax goes up.
Arguably, cranking the tax could also lead to people holding onto junker cars for sentimental reasons replacing them or repairing their engines. So really, it's win-win.
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
Then they pay you.
Way to ruin a Pigovian tax, guys.
<sarcasm> why not bump the registration fee for high-efficiency cars so people will buy the gas-guzzlers instead? That'll teach people to go green in Oregon!</sarcasm>
Here's a crazy idea. Instead of raising taxes in a tough economy, how about you do what everyone else is doing and tighten belt and reduce spending? Nah, you're right, that will never work...
I find a simple "mileage" tax as difficult to manage logistically.
I mean, as it stands now, you pay gasoline tax for whatever state you're buying the gasoline in, and presumably the state who's roads you're using.
Under this system, who gets the money if I live in Oregon, but I drive north to Colorado to go skiiing?
Would
How about letting us pump our own gas first, then work on this high-tech stuff.
The problem is, fuel efficient cars weigh less, and therefore do less damage to the road.
Thus a gasoline tax is actually better at putting many of the costs on the actual source: heavier, less efficient vehicles. As a bonus, fuel taxes encourage smaller, lighter, more efficient cars which are better for society in the long run.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Funny, my state-mandated GPS receiver seems to be on the fritz. No, I don't know how that antenna cable came to be severed. Maybe it accidentally got mashed in the door ...
As noted previously, an odometer would serve the "mileage tax" purpose without the unnecessary oversight of GPS position tracking. Just read the damned thing whenever you bring the vehicle in for emissions testing.
If they really feel the need to tax driving, why not just add the tax at the gas pumps? The GPS method seems an inefficient - and costly - way to monitor driving habits (privacy issues, anyone?).
just my $0.02
Just raising fuel taxes? I mean, those with gas guzzling cars get taxed more, but if they don't drive that much it isn't all that bad. Those with fuel efficient cars get taxed less but pay much more when they use their car all the time. A Porsche Cayenne doing 5000miles per year is most likely less harmful for the road system (and environment) than a Toyota Prius doing 50000miles a year. In the end it simply evens out.
Simple logic, isn't it? In my country they call it "pollueur payeur". (But then we pay also road tax based on CO2 emissions, regardless off how much we drive.... *sighs* - owner of a high-emission-CO2 vehicle which he doesn't drive all that often)
Besides, in the end.... How hard would it be to disable the GPS device? Anything that relies on "client security" is doomed to fail. This is an example of client security, just not as obvious as in typical computer security. A friend of mine used to have to pay the miles on his company car for private usage. Well, he simply took out the fuse for the dashboard while driving privately. Worked like a charm.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Why just use the fancy new technology called an odometer?
Because by car you can easily drive to other states?
Why should Oregon collect the money for time spent on non Oregon roads?
Use of a GPS ensures they get tax money for time spent on Oregon roads. Not that it's in any way a good idea, as it does not account for drivers from other states making sue of Oregon roads... That's the advantage of a gas tax, it more or less captures money for the state from most people making use of state roads.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They won't monitor anyone.
Then someone will decide to monitor sex offenders.
Next, someone will decide to monitor government employees.
Next, it's all drivers under the age of 18.
Next, someone will decide to monitor everyone convicted of a felony.
Next, it's misdemeanors.
Probably only 10 years until it's everyone.
If they removed the tax on gas and used this, I'm sure they would exempt many government vehicles and save the MANY $$$ on government fuel costs.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis.
Let me get this straight. In a move straight from Orwell, they want to track every vehicle in the state for the purposes of getting more taxes out of people, and you're concerned about whether it can be used for alibis and whether there's a hole in the technical details?
I've got a few problems with this. My first reaction to the statement about more efficient cars is that they shouldn't be punishing people for buying those cars. More efficient cars are also the ones which do the least damage to the environment and the surfaces they drive on since they tend to weigh much less than the alternatives. Punishing those people for being efficient doesn't make sense. A better measure would be to raise the taxes on gasoline. One year ago the price was over double what it is now. Even adding $.50 or $1 to the tax wouldn't bring the prices to what they were.
My next objection would be the costs of the system. The infrastructure would cost a lot of money, it would raise the cost of cars sold in Oregon and also cost the state money in terms of fighting the inevitable legal battles which may render the system entirely worthless. It seems like a gross misuse of funds.
Finally, the philosophical objections. Inevitably, many people will have access to this information, and the abuses are many. They range from the government using it to track people to as simple as a stalker knowing where his victim is at all times. At the very least it would raise concerns with police abuses.
Overall, there is no way that this proposal is a good idea.
The amount of damage done to a road by a passing vehicle is a geometric? exponential? function of the weight of the vehicle. For instance, say a road will fail if a 100,000 pound vehicle drives over it. In that case, a 120,000 pound truck would do much more damage than two 60,000 trucks. At the low end, you reach a point where no damage is done at all. It's not possible to ruin a modern highway with bicycles, for example.
So you're justified in taxing vehicles proportionally to their weight, since more weight means more damage, which means more expensive repairs. Conveniently enough, gas mileage is a useful proxy for vehicle weight: the heavier they are, the more gas tax they pay per mile.
I have no love for Priuses, but it's insane to tax them the same as someone in a semi truck. There are two possible explanations that don't involve Gov. Kulongoski being a stark moron:
Any Oregonians have insight on the matter?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
My vehicle doesn't have an integral GPS system. If I lived in Oregon, how would they then track MY mileage? Would they require by law that my vehicle be retrofitted with a GPS system? Who would pay for that? Would they require that I pay for it out of pocket?
Above issues aside, this tax might make some efficiency and environmental sense: people might think twice about making unnecessary trips altogether, or make a more concerted effort (as I do) to delay some trips until I can combine them with other errands and kill several birds with the same gallons of gas.
Bad idea, it punishes investment in new cleaner technology. Suddenly your (future) plugin hybrid pays as much for road maintenance as a supersized 1990s SUV/truck or even a semi triple trailer (we have those in OR)
Consumption tax is only good if implemented correctly: milage*road_damage_factor*environmental_factor*road_safety_risk would be a starting point.
Then you raise the tax. What's the downside? It's not like people are going to consume less gas if the tax goes up.
Actually, it's exactly like that. When the price of gas was up summer travel plummeted which impacted tourist destinations everywhere, even stuff in the same state where most of the visitors came from. Also less needed visits like mall visits or museum visits go down, as people cut back on non-essential travel.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most likely the state gets much of it's revenue from gas taxes. He's talking about weakening Oregon by forcing citizens to drive less. And how about those that drive though the state from other states such as WA and CA? Time to vote in a new Governor.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
What about my moped? My bicycle? Are you going to tax me when I go jogging?
Oh my, a mileage tax causes such warm and fuzzy feelings.
If the information exists, you can bet your freedom that law enforcement will attempt to use it to secure your conviction.
And if its use can be automated, you can be similarly certain that its use will be automated, whether appropriately or otherwise. After all, the courts are there to sort it all out.
If something like this were implemented, trucking companies who happen to be based in Oregon would suddenly find themselves elsewhere, with their trucks registered as being owned in other states. The state would lose a chunk of commercial revenue off of this, AND have to deal with higher prices to ship stuff into the state.
The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT
That will last as long as it takes to process the first subpoena, if that. There is no way this won't be abused. If Oregon has vehicle inspection, then why not just use odometer checks instead? Or check the odometer reading when they renew their tags. You don't need GPS for that. Lower the tax per mile and don't worry about whether the miles were in Oregon or not. A penny a mile is like $1,000 on the life of most cars. It can't pay to run some kind of GPS tracking system for that.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How can they legally do this on rural lands with private roads that do not get any money from the government. Farmers and loggers should not have to pay a mileage tax for driving on their own roads that they own and maintain. Tar and feather the taxman!
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
Oregon residents are too dumb to be allowed to pump their own gas.
GPS tracking will only protect them even more from the dangerous selves.
Why can't Oregon simply read the odometer when they inspect the car? Or are they one of those hippy libertarian states that deems inspections an undue burden from The Man?
I LOVE the idea of those that use the roads the most paying more to use them.
I HATE the idea of the government forcing me to install a GPS unit on my car.
My question: Why not use that newfangled odometer I've been reading about. They could check it when you have it inspected (for most states).
I'm also one of those people that loves the idea of E-ZPass... but have yet to install one due to privacy concerns.
It's still a damn tax regardless of what we call
it. Someone has realized a gas tax is a problem
if we are pushing for higher and higher mpg.
All of a sudden folks aren't using as much gas.
Oh noes ! There goes our revenue ! This was
predicted back when folks started taking electric
cars seriously.
A substantial amount of money is made by taxing
fuel. If we use half the fuel, they get half the
tax revenue. Thus, a new tax system is needed
to ensure a continued revenue stream.
What to do? What to do. . . .
Maybe we should double the existing tax?
or
Institute a driving tax! Of course! Brilliant!
This way, no matter what, they will get their
tax money. ( Unless you quit driving of course )
Then, of course, we'll introduce the non-driving :|
tax next to cover that one. . .
--
Laws are written to protect the stupid ones
from the obvious solution.
Interesting that they don't complain when people buy low-efficiency vehicles. Bunch of hypocrites.
Say no to double-dipping!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Exactly. It's essentially a subsidy for inefficient vehicles.
Hands in my pocket
Private vs. Public roads (I suppose GPS can figure that out, but still).
Seems like this would significantly hamper transportation services if they have to pay per mile now, too.
GPS in every car sounds very privacy-invasive. I wonder how they're going to start keeping up sidewalks? Personal GPS systems to see who uses them the most and charge them? :P
May as well put in a digital speedometer so that the GPS can figure out what the max speed is, the speedometer can report when your car goes over that speed, and you get an automatic ticket...
He's the worst thing that has happened to this state in the 32 years I've been alive.
Criminalizing cold medicine and tracking citizens' movements. I can't wait to vote this asshat out of office.
and as well, change the current fuel tax into a distance tax, that way at least there's no advantage for those people who bought high-efficiency cars. Maybe take it a step further, and make the fuel free, and just charge every car the same amount for distance, regardless of its efficiency.
Oregon is a circus of strange tax experiments. OR's income tax rates are relatively high (9%), but they do not have a sales tax. Discussions about introducing a sales tax are non-starters, as there are so many changes that multiple parties object. Economic gains/losses are magnified due to this, as the employment numbers rise/fall, but out-of-state shopper populations change on different cycles.
There is also a "kicker" that is given back when state revenue from taxes exceeds the estimate (budget) by 2% or more. But then the state spends about 1.3$million on mailing individual checks, tracking people down, etc - instead of simply putting tax credits on the books for the next year.
There have been serious talks about taxing/licensing bicycles due their use of roads (no idea if its by wheel, weight, speed, rider's age, etc). Portland, OR has a large population of cyclists that intermingle with cars on many local roads.
The state has a huge income disparity between urban and rural districts, and thus pools its school funding monies for dispersal but other statistics, which creates lots of friction all around.
Property taxes go up, but there are endless initiatives to deny funding increases to social services, since they are under constant accusal of being bloated. The truth depends on what you define as adequate social servicing.
See the Oregon Tax Revolt for some info.
Source: Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office budget analysis for 2007-2009 budget cycle (emphasis mine)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/8rgj6k (www.leg.state.or.us)
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
So long as they actually lower and eventually remove the gas tax, this isn't a bad idea. It makes sense that if you're using their roads, you need to pay to help keep them up. Not a foreign concept. The major problem with this is: currently the gas tax gets interstate traffic, this new plan will not. If you're a trucker and you drive through a state then when you fill up with gas you're helping to maintain the very roads you used to get your product from point A to point B. Under this new system, Oregon tax payers would foot the bill for truckers and other interstate traffic to cut through their state and use their roads (basically) free of charge. That's not cool at all.
Sure. I knew you could.
This would replace a very fair and workable system (gasoline taxes), with an intrusive, costly, potentially abusive system that probably would not work well anyway.
Did all the politicians in this country take a bunch of stupid pills or something?
I am seeing a lot of "Why not just raise gas taxes?" and all I can think of is "Why raise taxes at all?" Let the government shrink if it can't raise enough money to pay people to do fake work. I'll let /. define fake work, but I think you the picture.
The argument seems to be they don't have enough money to pay their employees salaries and pay for social program expenditures. I will agree with that premise, but that is where my agreement stops. The government is in effect giving it's people an ultimatum (you know those things your mother used to issue to see how far you wanted to go when testing your limits?) that is saying "we have to spy on you to justify charging you more, or we're going to cut out the library/park/etc funding so we can keep paying ourselves."
I really only see two viable options to this type of tyranny: 1) elect new leadership, or 2) stop paying taxes.
The problem with those options are that you have to suffer years before you can get new leaders to solve current problems, and potential jail time for tax evasion.
I still wonder what the panic on the politicians faces would look like if even 20% of the tax payers didn't pay as a form of protest.
compulsory gps tracking of my vehicle?
I have prepared a statement for the State of Oregon and any government official who thinks this is a good idea:
Ahem...
"Fuck You".
Thank you, that is all.
i don't quite understand. if are going to have less travelers and are selling less gas, then you won't have as many people on the road, and therefore you won't need the tax money.
shouldn't the amount of people on the road be a direct correlation to the amount of taxes needed (gas sold)?
What to do? What to do. . .
Tar and Feather the Tax man like good ole Great Great Great Grandpa Adams did
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
I swear officer, I have no idea how that tin foil got over that GPS device!
Someone else mentioned this is "astoundingly stupid" because heavier vehicles do more damage to the road, so they should be taxed more. He is correct.
But there is something so perverse here it makes my skin crawl. Taxing per mile driven DECREASES the road tax on heavy gas guzzlers. For example, two cars go on a 100 mile road trip. One is a SUV that gets 12.5 mpg so it uses 8 gallons. The other is a Prius and uses two gallons. At 25 cents per gallon, the SUB would pay $2 in tax versus 50 cents for the Prius.
That's the old way. The new way is that both cars would pay $1.20 in tax to make the trip. So the effect of this change is to increase the road tax on efficient cars and decrease the road tax on inefficient cars.
The GOOD solution has been mentioned by many many people here. Increase the tax per gallon. The state gets enough money to maintain the roads, and we preserve lower taxes per mile for light efficient vehicles.
As an Oregon resident, this is clearly just another tax that our illustrious governor is going to use to double-dip. Our state is already highly financially mismanaged by our state government, and now they are proposing "solutions" like this.
Yesterday, I contacted our governor about this, and gave him the following points about why this is completely unacceptable:
- If the tax is based on mileage, then what incentive to I have to choose a hybrid over a hummer? (our state is FULL of greenies, and promotes hybrid vehicles all over)
- Under no circumstances will I accept a government tracking device in my vehicle.
- While its proposed as a replacement to the gas tax, I'm not stupid enough to believe that gas tax will go away if this is implemented. This will just be ADDED in.
- We will no longer tax the out-of-staters (both people traveling from CA to WA & vice versa, as well as all of the people who choose to live in Vancouver and work in Portland)
This is unacceptable. I told the governor I will leave the state I've lived in since I was very young, and not look back, if he pursues this bull**** additional tax. Until they can figure out how to manage the money they do get, I see no reason they should get any more. The new I-5 interstate bridge in Portland is projected to cost several times what the longer/larger replacement to the bridge that collapsed in the midwest 2 years ago, and we just opened a $400,000 outdoor toilet in downtown Portland. And now they want MORE of my money? Governor Sleepy Ted, you can kiss my ass.
Seems like a toll system would work well here. No expensive tracking devices, no retrofitting, and it creates more jobs.
Sure, you wouldn't get to toll 100% of the traffic, just the major veins of traffic, but that should more than offset the losses. Seems to work in other states, why not here?
perhaps an "opt in" ability for this would be good. just use economics to steer which way people will go. increase the gas tax until it is too uneconomical to opt out of this system.
"A road tax based on CO2 emisions".... that should be a fuel tax, right?
For a given fuel type, in a modern engine, the CO2 emission is very close to proportional to the volume of fuel burnt. I guess a "fuel tax" doesn't sound as modern and environmental as a "CO2 emissions tax" though.
Look, you want to buy something that guzzles gasolien, fine with me. But you ARE costing the rest of us assets. You are helping the Arabs, using up a valuable and limited resource, and polluting my air. All I ask is that you PAY for what you are doing - i.e. a gas tax.
Yes this will help those that spend more money to buy non-gas based vehicles. So what - they DESERVE to pay less per mile. They invested in technology that benefits all of us. Often they paid thousands of dollars for the right to do this.
What next, charging a tax on nicotine patches because 'it's not fair to the ciggarette smokers'?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm also one of those people that loves the idea of E-ZPass... but have yet to install one due to privacy concerns.
Don't worry, they just take a picture of your license plate when you pull up to the toll booth.
Prepare for the Fed. This directly affects interstate commerce, over which the Federal Government does have jurisdiction. If you tax such things as trucking companies on mileage then you will see a rise in the price of everything (like higher groceries). So, raise the price on driving and raise the price on groceries? Awesome, now Oregonians are gonna be even more angry with their elected officials and vote em out next time. I don't see this getting put in. They might try it on for size and then get backlash for trying something so silly.
Oregon... the state that rewards the polluters in gas guzzling cars.
What is going to keep me from removing the GPS tracker and powering it from a battery or a power inverter?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
For all those people living in the greater Portland area, who don't have a GPS in their car and dont want to pay the higher gas tax, what would keep those people from just driving to Vancouver, WA (or any surrounding state for that matter) and purchasing their gas from there?
I drive down to Portland all the time to save sales tax on expensive items. Wouldn't it stand to reason that the people driving new cars would do the same, but drive to WA/ID/CA/NV to avoid the per mile gas tax?
So, I can't bring my car from another state, and why don't I just take the stupid thing off until I get my car inspected?
I told the governor I will leave the state I've lived in since I was very young, and not look back, if he pursues this bull**** additional tax.
If all the good people leave, all you have left is...
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
If tax revenues are declining because of fuel-efficient cars, the obvious, simple solution is a small increase in the fuel tax. This provides the required $$$, and increases the incentive to reduce gasoline use.
A high-tech approach involving installation of expensive GPS units in every car is just crazy, if viewed as a revenue raising measure.
But gee, I bet there's lots of other uses for that GPS tracking data...
</tinfoil-hat>
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Add a few more players to the game, and you get:
- A national system of tollways, with microcharging so it's useable on roads of any size
- A billing system for parking stations, event parking, or even roadside parking at all in city zones
- Ability to charge more for certain roads during peak periods (like a congestion tax)
- A speed tax?
-- All your bass are below two Hz
What the fuck is wrong with this country? Seriously, instead of fixing the problem at its core we come up with an idea that is so fucking ridiculous that I want to cry. Let's track in-state driving habits so we can charge road consumption tax... You can't be serious!
First of all, if you want to raise money have toll roads. You can't drive anywhere in MA without dropping a dollar or two. If you don't like that idea, raise the gas tax. And if you don't like even that, raise sales tax on the vehicles that have the most potential to damage roads (SUVs). And finally why not just say "Look, we have no money to fix the roads and thus we are raising the states sale's tax." If you don't have any sources that you can tax, legalize weed and prostitution. Tax that. But please for the love of God do not track private citizens across the state in order to raise pennies on the dollar you have spend on the system.
People will simply buy older cars that do not have the tracking equipment and hang on to those cars for longer periods of time. Also there is a famous option of buying a car out-of-state and having your insurance information sent to a P.O. Honestly, I am all for environment protection and better usage of natural resource but I am not willing to give up any of my liberties in favor of a law that is so wrong.
It seems to me that if you tax a staple good
What if you staple your tacks good?
Free Martian Whores!
My idea was to scale the gasoline tax according to the MPG of the vehicle. For that you need technical means, such as RFID chips on cars and pumps that can read them. The Oregon Governor's plan sounds a bit easier to implement. It could be modified to take MPG as an input into the tax equation, because if you tie the annual odometer reading to the VIN then you know what kind of MPG it gets, barring some fancy after-market kit.
Sorry for venting, but I am getting increasingly aggravated the more I read about moronic,
out-of-touch elected officials who think that they can just subvert technology to accomplish
things that are so completely unrealistic, it boggles the mind and should make us question
their very sanity.
After all we are supposed to be relying on them to represent us and serve us, and therefore are
expected to possess a modicum of basic common sense when it comes to dealing with a changing
landscape of what's around us, how to best and wisely use it, and how NOT TO.
Whether reading about pipe dreams of countrywide deep-packet inspection in Australia for
the sake of catching child porn traders who will just use encrypted connections anyway
(but in the process creating a nightmare of slowdowns and false positives for millions), or forcing
ISPs to monitor content and become special interest copyright cops, to this.....
It seems to denote a fundamental level of cluelessness and utter stupidity that is fairly depressing.
Hey, maybe that is what the real world is like outside of Slashdot?
Some days it feels that 'Idiocracy' (the movie) probably didn't do so well because we are already there....
No LOLs from me this time.
Z.
This is such a thinly-veiled farce it's not even funny.
First off, the premise that people are dropping their gas guzzlers for fuel-efficient vehicles is just plain wrong. Where I live, huge trucks and SUVs are still all the rage for highway commuters. Cars are still very much in the minority on the roads and I haven't seen any evidence that consumers are migrating to economy cars in any significant numbers, even with the insane gas prices we saw this year. The prices were high enough to be an inconvenience and give SUV owners something to complain about on their way to Starbucks, not enough to cause people to trade in their status symbols for something economical.
Second, I hate it that when one tax revenue stream starts to lower somewhat, the first thing politicians try to do is find something else to tax instead of looking at where they can reduce spending.
Third, as others have pointed out, there are much easier ways of tracking individual vehicle mileage that don't severely impinge on civil liberties. Mark my words, this is a surveillance program first and a taxation program second. Just like the purpose of OnStar isn't as much for life-or-death emergencies (as you hear on the commercials) as it is for tracking the car if/when the police become interested in it.
The article is basically a troll / blog-frenzy IMHO.
A few points:
1. This study was done over a year ago (it ended in November of 2007), and was just that, a study. Oregon has been studying things like this since the 1990's at least, along with all sorts of other idea.
2. They aren't talking about tracking vehicles with GPS, just using GPS based odometers if manufactureers start offering them:
3. It's an alternative to the tax, not a replacement.
--MarkusQ
But if he's going to do this he should go full tilt and have the tax based on the vehicles weight too as this is a big factor in road wear. This was a guy driving a rig is going to have to pay his just dues compared to the motorcyclist or those of us who drive a car that weighs less than the hood ornament of one of those fancy Ford/Chevy/Toyota monster mobiles that can haul three stone blocks from the Great Pyramid of Giza in the bed but often carry little more than some redneck, a case of Coors and a few Garth Brooks CDs.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
"A better question would be "Wouldn't taxing miles instead of fuel also bend the market and depress travel? If it would, why not just keep taxing fuel, since we already have a system in place to do so?"
I totally agree, taxing miles travelled would have the same effect, possibly more in fact since as the price of gas lowers people travel more again but a tax on miles travelled would not change as often as the price of gas, thereby more permanently depressing non-essential travel.
Not to mention that people would be up in arms over having to be tracked.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh lookie, a comment from Oregon's Department of Transportation!
Free Martian Whores!
Thanks for insulting Texas and Alaska, guy. This is exactly what I come to Slashdot for. To hear ignorant lowlifes badmouth my home. :)
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
I never see the red but what the fuck is up with this garbage they are passing off as javascript programming these days? A basic news site shouldn't be ajaxing my computer to a crawl for any amount of time. Try loading slashdot in a ARM based web tablet (Nokia N800) with javascript enabled and you will wish you never clicked "go". I don't know who is responsible for the coding but learn to do some optimization. What could you possibly be calculating and computing where I constantly get a popup about a hung script when gmail, which uses tons more javascript and general AJAX, can do a decent job of displaying itself on even the most underpowered PC.
I never hope for anything to continue until I die - because I could die 1 second after that, and get my wish.
I rather hope to outlive my cars.
Last time I checked, a government in the US wasn't allowed to track its citizens' movement. Aside from being a really bad idea logistically, I'm pretty sure this won't be o.k. with the various government watchdogs.
Not NEW taxes. Plus a whole new scheme that invites cheating, hacking, and scheming.
Oh, well I am sure we will be able buy fake GPS reports from the same people we buy our fake handicapped and resident parking permits from.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Easy fix. Oregon residents connect their "device" which refunds the "gas tax" and charges them the "road tax"
1) How does Oregon know how much you have spent of gas? You are proposing Oregon collects the ID for every gas purchase?
2) I'm in Oregon, and simply wrap the GPS receiver in aluminum foil until it's time to take it in. I get a full refund on my gas tax and pay for a few tens of miles of roads travelled when in reality I've travelled many thousands. It only has to read enough to get to the border and back and then what could they say about it?
Not to mention that devices simply fail as well, do you get nothing if your device fails?
3) What happens when the milage tax exceeds the cost of the gas tax. Why would I not simply choose to destroy the device (probably electrical overload being the favored method).
State mounted and maintained GPS devices in every car are stupid for so many reasons, those are just a few.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except the rate was much lower, about .002 per mile. Still they wouldn't repeal the fuel tax, in fact they'd increase it.
But with alternative fuel vehicles they're going to have to figure out some way to tax.
First off it's a ludicrous idea that the ACLU will challenge in federal courts the moment it (Big IF) is passed.
Having a gps monitored by the state (or third party)is just waiting for the law enforcement bureaus to subpoena to find out what Mr. Anderson was doing when his alibi says he was banging his mistress, instead of killing his wife.
It will never get off the ground.....
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
Obviously this is a bad idea for a whole host of technical reasons (GPS is unreliable in cities or heavily wooded areas, easy to tamper with, requires time to lock on, is expensive, and way more complicated than a simple odometer), but the biggest problem with this is that it's a stupid rumor that keeps coming back every 6 months.
I read the internet for the articles.
Since it looks like older cars wouldn't be required to retrofit - I would have one vehicle with a very, very large tank that I fill using the 1.2/mi and another that I would drive at the 24 per gallon vehicle - and accomplish that by siphoning the fuel out of the 1.2/mi vehicle. I would effectively drive for much less that way. :)
Illiterate? Write for free help!
Using common sense, it's obvious why pay-as-you drive hasn't been rolled out already. It's hard to come up with a way to do it in a secure and practical way. I'll guarantee that if somebody rolls this out with current technology, people will be cheating the shit out of it with a week of deployment.
Still don't underestimate the ability of governments to piss vast amounts of money up against the wall on technically infeasible projects. Take ID cards, road pricing and electronic health records in the UK as notable (and hugely expensive) examples.
Let me understand this: We've already got a mechanism that measures and taxes usage, and Oregon wants to go to a mechanism that requires a massive investment in tracking technology and administration, and will essentially take away much of the incentive to use less fuel? Is Kulongoski nuts, or is he just floating this out as some kind of "straw man" or "trial balloon" to see what kind of reaction it gets? I fail to understand why U.S. politicians can't grow some cojones and do what the rest of the world does - raise fuel taxes. This motivates consumers to drive less and buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, and it focuses the automobile manufacturers on supplying the demand for those vehicles. No CAFE legislation, no goofy GPS-tracking and, just as important, no bloated bureaucracy.
This is something a Conservative (of either party) would endorse. It started with seat belts and Mr Green Party himself. Once we permitted the Fed into our cars, there would be no stopping them.
And no, there's no reason for them to stop charging us more money...and no reason for them to stop spending. So enjoy, Oregon! You're getting who you voted for!
The rest of us: we've gotta stop this crap. Democrats and other Liberals want the Fed in EVERY aspect of our lives.
Don't think so?
How about CFC's? How about laws banning trans-fats? How about wanting to take over the carmakers and make the cars "they ought to" instead of what the market demands?
Wake up, guys...smell the democracy burning.
The Three R's of Portland
or
Why Portland Sucks
"Latte Town" was coined a few years back and is the most appropriate term for the City of Portland that I have ever heard. A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface. Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland's dirty little secret is revealed. Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about. Drive through any neighborhood surrounding the downtown area and the impression that you get is that Portland is nothing more than a series of elitist ghettos compromised of rich white homosexuals, rich white yuppies, rich white hippies, rich white trust funders, and rich white kids from the suburbs pretending to be street people. Where's the diversity? Well it doesn't exist but the average Portlander likes the concept and in their eyes the different shades of rich whites all constituent diversity. In a series of articles I will attempt to breakdown and explain these subtle distinctions between the various factions of lily white, latte people that make Portland what it is.
The Artist-Intellectual
The visitor or newcomer to Portland is bound to be struck by the sheer numbers that belong to this group. They seem to be everywhere and are in fact everywhere. They are the reason that all the coffee shops have tables and chairs. The artist-intellectual fancies himself as a poet, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, etc. You get the drift. They spend most of their days idling around the coffee establishments that one finds every 10 feet. They are usually equipped with a notebook that they use for their poems, journals or their artwork. No one ever gets to see the contents of these notebooks. More often than not they have a beaten and weathered paper back copy of some book authored by Kafka or William S. Boroughs. They love to discuss their favorite subject, themselves. Given the opportunity they will prattle on for hours about their poems, art work or the film they are making. You never get to actually see any of their work but you do get to hear about it. Their lives are like one never ending semester in grad school. Initially I believed these losers but then got to thinking. What would an aspiring actor, artist, musician, filmmaker being doing in Portland Oregon, a latte town? Why wouldn't they be in NYC or LA? Because they're phonies, that's why. Here's how it works with these clowns. They flunk out of college in New Jersey so their parents send them to Reed College in Portland in hopes that they will get their act together. They drop out of Reed but stay in Portland while still on Daddy's tab or some trust find. One Saturday Josh or Seth drifts down to one of the hundreds of hippie craft markets downtown. Some hippie is selling didgeridoos that he made I between bong reps. Josh buy one and takes it home where he proceeds to get baked after which he blows a few sour notes into the didgeridoo. The next day he's a musician. Not really but that's what he's telling everyone at the coffee house and pretending is good enough for a Portland artist-intellectual, in fact it's everything. In three months he will switch his designation from musician to filmmaker and then onto to something else 3 months later. As long as it sounds cool he will keep this charade up and no one in his circles will call him on it because they are doing the same thing.
The Activist
This group is usually comprised of people that used to be part of the artist-intellectual group in Portland. They have gotten a little older and may have finally, after 12 years, obtained a liberal arts degree from Portlan
What kind of ridiculous form gives you the credit when your car gets towed by the Munis for junk parking?
"You park in the fire lane, we tow you from Oregon to NY and back".
Oops. Watch them forget, then "forget".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
oH, fUCK nO.
This has been posted to slashdot many time over the years. All tire are being tracked right now:
TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act
the TREAD act requires all tire to have a radio transmitter in them.
http://www.tireindustry.org/pdf/tread_act.pdf
this writeup is several years old now, and it is pretty much impossible to buy tires that do not have tracking devices in them.
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/repost-of-anonymous-rant-most-cars-have-secret-rfids-to-allow-us-govt-to-spy/
This is a repost. I did not write this. The original writer is anonymous.
TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders! While you drive on highways. Wires in the road and 14 feet above, work fine and log your car movement. Read on for more.
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFID chips embedded in the tire).
Yup. My brother works on them (since 2001).
The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) made it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires allowing efficient scanning of moving cars.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
Taggant chemical research papers :
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF [princeton.edu]
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of tracking chips before molded deep into tires! :
http://www.sokymat.com/index.php?id=94 [sokymat.com]
PLEASE LOOK AT THAT LINK : Its the same shocking tire material I have been trying to tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.
a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html [sokymat.com]
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it inserts usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the embedded LOGI 160 chips that the us Gov scans when you cross Mexican and Canadian bord
This is the most ridiculous, anti-American idea, and a gross violation of privacy. Who in their right mind is content to let the government attach a GPS tracking device to their vehicle, and agree to pay a per mile tax in this economy? This is the worst idea the government has ever come up with, which is saying a lot with the doozies they've come up with before. To hell with this idea. Our elected officials need to learn how to spend the taxes they have effectively, stop bailing out the rich, and stop hitting up the working class every time they want a few more bucks. Asinine.
A use tax for our roads and bridges is exactly what the gas tax is supposed to be. The deterioration of a road is directly related to the number of vehicles and their weight. When engines are all about equally efficient, then taxing fuel is a good a proxy as any for road usage.
But with the advent of hybrid technologies, and the push for new fuels which might not be gasoline, there is an inequality with use vs. amount of taxes paid for that use.
Taxing the number of miles traveled, however, is not the right answer. It's not even a good answer. It is, fundamentally, a bad answer. It is an answer with cloaked malicious intent, because it seeks to monitor the movement of the citizenry rather than recover taxes proportionate to use.
Far better would be to radically reduce or eliminate the gas tax and introduce a steeper tire tax. Tire wear is a far better proxy for road wear (that is, the amount of wear that the road has, which, mostly, determines when it needs to be resurfaced), since it is proportionate to vehicle weight and number of miles traveled. Road wear is also, not surprisingly, proportionate to vehicle weight and number of cars that pass a given point (ergo, miles traveled by each car).
Just tax tires. Problem solved. No need for additional gadgetry that requires a new infrastructure for inspection and reporting. Seriously, either this legislator is on crack or is being backed by some seriously questionable money.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
--
Taxman
The Beatles
Revolver
Seriously, people. Have we failed somewhere in transmitting the message that the Beatles song is *satire* and Orwell's DYS-topia is a *warning*!? It's not a cook book for Governments to follow to do that voodoo that they do!
Oh, that's a great idea. So THAT's how we can do that and get away with it! Now, how do we tax their feet?
Slashdot articles, Jan 2011.
"Today the laptop with the Oregon GPS data was stolen. 177 companies "accidentally" got access to a copy. Now they can give you ads based on where you actually drive because we know the Big Autos need a bailout!"
"Today the Swedish hacker 'Lazor' replaced his GPS with that of a deceased former resident of Taiwan."
"The GPS of the Detroit Police suddenly racked up a lot of miles. Turns out, it was force fed to a migrating bird flying south for the winter."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So, you want to track, by GPS, the entire driving population of your state and at the same time have it properly interface with the gas pumps?
Who was it that said they had a portable GPS generator? If the pumps are looking to get a signal, almost anyone with access to the Internet and a few bucks would be able to tell the pumps they "are being tracked".
This is such a mind-numbing waste of resources I can't even begin to tell where the first person jumped on the stupid truck.
So, if I want to spy on someone I will just tell them I need to do so for some other reason. And if that other reason is for taxing then my victim is going to pay for the privilege of being spied upon. Smart.
Can't say much about Alaska but I've been all over Texas. It is nothing, and a whole lot of it. The only noteworthy things about Texas are those gigantic rabbits which will walk up to you and kick your ass. But I'm one of those native Californian fags so I look down on everywhere else's inhabitants as being "ignorant lowlifes" :)
"lawmakers would have to have several screws loose to think this is a good or practical idea"
Since when has any elected official ever been able to resist the "All the people I've spoken with it think its a wonderful idea" self-delusion.
Tax gasoline very high (twice what you'd need, so you can repay the banks one and for all) and watch your revenues fall as gasoline conservation gets going.
With peak oil the revenues will rise as the prices rise again.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I live in Portland and I believe that the residents of this city, which is a very large portion of the state's overall population, will NOT let this happen.
Although I though the same thing about the gay marriage ban. So I'm still worried...
The only thing he's taxing is our patience.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Um, you do realize that OR is the state that has mysterious crossing signals for walking along portions of sidewalk, right? Having seen that more than a few times, I'm not sure if anything down there would surprise me.
Use the chip in the car to have the car tell the pump how much it weighs. A 6,000lb SUV does much more damage to the road than a 2,800lb grocery getter. The only other thing they could add would be to charge more for people driving in high volume areas like downtown where the cost of the construction of bridges is a lot higher.
So let me get this straight...
Gasoline tax - the more gas you guzzle by way of more miles or less efficient vehicle, the more you pay. No further costs.
VERSUS
Mileage tax - that extra $4,000 you paid for a enviro-friendly hybrid no longer saves you as much money. Now we need expensive $100/vehicle GPS units. Which will surely be hacked, creating a whole underworld of joe-average-now-a-felon.
Or perhaps the latter solution is really just an excuse for putting a GPS tracker into every licensed vehicle and one more step toward a fascist Nancy state where the government tracks everything you do. (And yet, strangely, millions of people will disappear and the government will have no clue where those people went.)
So either this is very insidious or sheer stupidity. Using Heinlein's razor, I'll wager on sheer stupidity. (Though there could be a third option. How many shares of Magellen and TomTom does Ted Kulongoski own?)
I don't understand why they need to use GPS? Oregon is Self-serve only. Just have the attendant get the odometer reading and enter it into a wireless handset with the license plate and let the DMV store the data with their last odometer reading, and you'd only need 1 row in the database, which has to be a lot cheaper and a lot less invasive, cheaper to implement and would have a real "reason" for OR to be self-serve only than what this guy is thinking.
All that being said, I still think it is a stupid idea.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
"The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded."
Great. So, instead of being financially rewarded for driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle, or for switching to alternative fuels, it'll be the same tax even if you're driving a big, inefficient SUV. Even worse, heavier vehicles (which tend to be the less efficient ones) cause more wear on the roads, and therefore generate higher road maintenance costs per km, which won't be reflected in the new tax.
And to implement this they want to deploy an entirely new, probably expensive, probably unreliable, GPS-based tracking system that nobody will ever think of a way of abusing (at the database end) or spoofing (at the vehicle end)?
Riiiight. Just up the damn gas tax, you idiots.
This is a bad way to implement a tax to recover damages to roads. At 24 cents per gallon versus 1.2 cents per mile is a tax raise on all fuel efficient vehicles that get more than 20MPG on average. That is most of the vehicles on the road.
Road damage occurs proportional to weight squared and to speed and to distance. Weight is squared because the energy imparted to a road is equal to force times distance. The force is the weight and the distance is also grows proportional to the weight, thus the energy is equal to weight squared. Power also damages roads. Power is energy per unit time. Time the depression occurs is inversely proportional to the speed. There is also a portion caused by the force required to push the vehicle through the air which goes up by the square of the speed, but this is much less than the weight of a vehicle at max legal speed of roads. So for the most part that can be ignored. Thus the tax should be made equal to a running total of the weight squared times current speed times distance traveled per unit time (update rate in seconds would be typical) over a year (or whatever period desired). If using metric it would be in kg-kg-km-km/hr units. A 4 metric ton (8,800lbs) vehcile traveling at the typical average of 64kph (40MPH) for 24,000km (15K miles) would have a sum of 12.288 trillion units. To get the same as the fuel tax such a SUV would use is 1,250 gallons at 12MPG or $300. dividing one into the other yields a rate of one cent per 409.6 million units in a year. At that rate a 2 ton car would pay only $75 all else the same. A 40 ton semi running mostly 100kph (62.5MPH) for 480,000km (300K miles) would pay $1,875,000.00. As you can see semis tear the roads up far more than any car or SUV. Multi unit vehicles like semis would have their taxes split by the weight of each after the summation is done.
They currently use 60K gals to go that far and pay about $14,400 in fuel taxes. To put the revenue at the same as current would reduce the rate to, at least, 10% to 4.096 billion units per cent in annual tax. Then the car pays $7.50 a year, the SUV $30 and the semi $187,500. A bicycle weighing 100kg (220lbs) going the typical 20kph (12.5MPH) for 4,800km (3,000 miles) would pay $0.02.
With rates like that, gas taxes become more of a carbon tax, but trucks would finally pay a fair share of road construction taxes. That will force more use of multimode container transport. The truck would only be used to/from the multimode yard at low city speeds. Far fewer trucks would be on the interstate reducing congestion. And they would be almost all single bottom as doubles and triples really up the taxes. And there would be a large incentive to go as small as you can and drive slower. Which likely would raise MPG quite a bit and really cut fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. The other thing is you would have to add quite a bit towards law enforcement, because there would be strong incentives to cheat by reducing the sensed weight.
I'm constantly getting in arguments with people when I assert that Democrats are essentially no more desirable than Republicans (and vice versa); that, in fact, "both" parties are composed of raging shitheads.
So, here we have it. A Democrat Governor who wants to track your car by GPS.
I rest my case.
Now, PLEASE stop voting for these people. I'm begging you.
-Peter
I don't think GPS is the way to go. If they were to use accelerometers it would provide the same information with the following advantages:
Lower cost
Would not be dependant on a GPS signal
Greatly minimizes the privacy issue
As an Oregon resident, privacy is the biggest concern for me. Also, how long until they decide to start using this to trap speeders? With accelerometers it virtually eliminates the privacy issue because they would never know where you are, just how fast you were going.
To equally charge 1.2 cents per mile driven for every vehicle regardless of weight, gas mileage or (when no gas is used - ie home-made bio-diesel, or even electric), or whether the vehicle was driven at all (towed, pulled on a trailer), is ridiculously stupid.
Factor in weight, gas-mileage (or no petroleum-based-fuel used at all), and whether or not the vehicle was actually driven, and maybe it might have a chance of being a proper replacement. Otherwise, all it is, is a tax on the middle and lower classes, leaving the rich or well-to-do with more money in their wallets or off-shore bank accounts.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Gas taxes overall are a messed-up concept. In BC, Canada, the major city of Vancouver already had gas taxes which is supposed to pay for transit infrastructure, etc.
Now the provincial gov't has introduced an ever-increasing tax (+$0.03 this year) on the whole province, but there doesn't seem to be any plan on *WHERE* this money goes, though most guess it to be paying off part of the extreme costs involved in hosting the next olympics...
So those in a city with good transportation are at an advantage, whereas those with crappy public transportation *must* drive.
Seems that a proper system would reassign a good slice of the tax to creating better transit infrastructure, etc and thus reducing the people's need on private transport, or perhaps at overall pollution-reduction strategies, but so far most have marked the whole concept as another cash-grab.
This is planned to be completely optional. Which means the state will draw LESS tax money.
People who drive high-mileage cars (Prius, Geo Metro, Civic, etc,) won't do this. It would be stupid.
People who drive a lot out of the state, but fill up in Oregon, WILL do it.
People with SUVs will do it.
Not to mention, what about anyone who does it, then fills up out of state a few times (say, commuters who work in Vancouver, Washington, but live in Portland, Oregon.) I fill up in Vancouver a few times, then when I fill up in Oregon, I'm hit with a $40 tax charge, because I haven't filled up here in a while, even though I've been driving here.
In the end, the state will draw LESS tax; until they make it mandatory.
But if you make it mandatory, you either need to subsidize it, or else you end up making every single car that doesn't have it illegal. Both are bad.
Okay, first, I have to admit I didn't vote for this Governor or the guy he replaced.
Personally, I'd love to find a way to point out that this is just 'a silly democrat thing' - but it has nothing to do with his politics.
Someone (probably in the DMV) sold him on this idea, in the thought that they can bilk more cash out of an unsuspecting populace. Trust me, right now they are stressing the 'we aren't tracking you' idea, but if this goes through, someday down the road that too will come about, in the interest of public safety.
This is a governor that set us up to require a prescription for OTC allergy medication because a tiny percentage of the population makes drugs with it.
The biggest issue in all of modern US government, and my state in particular, is the eagerness to threaten to cut the important services to try to push the tax paying public to shell out more. Of course, the choices of 'important' can vary.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
...I would like to let the rest of the country know that our governor is an idiot.
Thank you for your time. Please pass the word.
Has anyone asked what the cost will be to implement and maintain, vs the current gas tax?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Here's a thought: cut government expenditures.
Why is the solution always "let's get creative and find a new way to extract money from our citizens?" Much more useful would be a someone who has enough real world experience to know what to cut and enough balls to do it even though 0.0001% of the population whines (they will anyway- they're victims of anything they can think of). Where are the real leaders who can actually help our economic situation?
Your post, it makes no sense. Have you ever used a GPS receiver? Mine almost *never* loses signal, and in the mountains you get a great signal.
And you somehow think driving in the mountains in Oregon where GPS malfunctions but you're actually in another state is a huge concern? Yet you consider people having to submit receipts and evidence for EVERY TIME THEY DRIVE OUT OF STATE to be a minor inconvenience?
You know that these jokers never spend money collected for new roads and road maintenance on new roads and road maintenance. It all goes to the general fund to be pissed away on pet projects and socialists programs.
When they succeed driving everyone off the road, they'll dream up some other tax to replace it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you drive in Oregon you're already getting screwed.
They outta tack on a sign below the "Welcome to Oregon" sign that says "License and registration, please."
This seems strange until you hear about how Oregon signed a contract with some fuel company for the next couple of years at Bush administration rates - they're paying two dollars more per gallon for the next three years for all of the public transportation in Oregon. Nobody has apologized for the oversight.
Do they count the mileage you travel once you go across the Oregon borders? That would seem rather unfair since you would then be charged for gas tax in another state as well as the mileage for Oregon.
I have long been curious about the economics of large scale shipping across the U.S.
Most of the traffic I see on the interstate outside of metropolitan areas is trucking. I can't begin to guess how many thousands of trucks there are on the freeways in any given state on any given day.
Occasionally I also see trains on the rails. Those trains are obviously carrying hundreds of times more cargo than a semi truck. It seems doubtful that they consume hundreds of times more fuel. But I don't really know. I'd love to see the mile-tons/gallon of each.
It seems to me that rail should have put long-haul trucking out of business a long, long time ago. So why hasn't it.
I suspect that the real cost of long-haul trucking (namely the upkeep of an interstate system) are absorbed by the masses and not paid exclusively by the trucking companies. Whereas railroads are privately owned and maintained. Hence, all the costs of maintenance are shouldered by the shipping company.
I puzzle over the history that lead to privately owned rails and publicly owned roads.
sends you a ticket for traveling over the posted speed limit in the area? If I lived in Oregon...I would seriously begin to think about moving.
... use the gps antenna as a hat rack.
"gee, officer, really, I haven't driven this vehicle in a month".
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
I don't like pumping my own gas, the novelty of the idea wears off real fast in the rain.
I vote against pumping your own gas just like I vote for no sales tax. I like things the way they are.
If I wanted to make Oregon into Calif (californication) I would have moved to CA. If the the CA people
don't like the way Oregon runs things just get on I-5 and head south.
My question is, was this another shampoo invention?
Thanks, citizens of Oregon! With your continued efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, you are helping to ensure that this planet of ours is around for generations to come. Kudos to you for cutting down on your driving, buying new, fuel efficient vehicles, and using alternative methods of transportation.
Unfortunately, we're gonna have to fuck you.
Game... blouses.
One step closer to taxing air.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
The people of Oregon deserve someone with better math and problem solving skills than this...
They elected these idiots, they deserve what they get.
I drive a 1994 Toyota Supra Turbo....
i get about 20mpg normally(not that i care in a car that's faster than a Ferrari for 1/6th the price..)
I am getting so sick of the taxing crap they keep putting on us and the reserved crap for hybrid drivers that I'm about to move to Europe.
in town there is a spot that says "Reserved for hybrid vehicles"
recently it was stolen.....i wonder why, half the people here drive muscle cars getting 4-8mpg or trucks getting 10mpg...
I hate hybrids with a passion, and most of the drivers give such snooty looks to anyone not in one, and since they have no way to dispose of the battery there actually quite unhealthy for the environment, so my understanding of this is a simple what the fuck.
in my case i know its going to be a bad day when im behind a Prius on my way to work, gotta love hyper milers driving 45 on a one lane highway, i usually illegally pass them because i cant stand going 45 in a 70. Much less when i have a 9 second 1/4 mile car(its set for daily driving).
-Noc
Apparently, Oregon implemented this long ago and has been trying to convince the other surrounding States that it's a good idea.
What Oregon continuously doesn't get is road wear is a matter of physics where the heavier the vehicle, the more road damage -- not the miles driven. This means SUVs and the tractor trailers.
Instead of taxing vehicles for becoming more efficient, why not tax vehicles for becoming more massive? You know where this is going, but that's the point.
Taxes have tended to encourage people to do the right thing, and this tax instead digs its own grave.
Um, you do realize that OR is the state that has mysterious crossing signals for walking along portions of sidewalk, right? Having seen that more than a few times, I'm not sure if anything down there would surprise me.
It is also the state where it is illegal to eat ice cream on Sunday. And because of this, when I went to visit my family for Thanksgiving, I, my brother, and his family all became stars of America's Least Wanted due to us having root beer floats on the night of 2008-11-30.
And my question about this proposal...
What about cars that do not have GPS devices installed? Free pass for their owners?
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When you do buy gas? When you have driven.
How much gas do you buy? Depends on how far you drove.
When do you pay gas tax? When you buy gas.
Cars cannot drive without consuming fuel. Unless you are buying your own crude oil and refining your own fuel, you already pay tax based on how much you drive.
This idea has nothing to do with taxes. It's about control and invasion of privacy.
Why don't they cut down the amount spent on Welfare and institute a state sales tax? Before I get flamed on the welfare comment, I do realize there were some movements afoot to reform Welfare in Oregon. I just don't know the outcome of those movements.
"Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer"- Jack Thompson
Here's a thought to cut the expenses from the other side of the coin.
How about NOT forcing the taxpayer to absorb the greased palm deals between the state representatives and vendors supplying the damn orange safety cones/lights/barrels/barracades you see every two fucking feet strewn across miles of highways for seemingly years after the construction is done.
Of course, let's not forget about the residual revenue from the $250 speeding ticket that "instantly" became a $500 speeding ticket because you were traveling through a construction zone that hasn't had a worker manning it for months.
To be fair, I don't live in Oregon, but I've yet to drive through a state that didn't have this asinine "scenery" of safety.
As an Oregon resident, I'll state my preference for a higher gas tax for just these reasons.
A gas tax simply aligns with the public externalities of motor vehicles a lot better than just milage, since bigger cars cause more wear. There's no incentive for buying less damaging vehicles this way. Also, gas taxes are easy to collect, while this is more complex. Net revenue will be reduced by the cost of monitoring, plus there's the initial capital cost of getting the whole thing set up.
And while all taxes cause some distortion in the market, it's best to pick ones where the distortion is the least painful or disruptive, or otherwise aligned with society goals. Reducing petroleum imports and carbon emissions are both clear public goals. If consumption is going down, the tax is doing what it should, and so the best thing to do is to raise it to maintain the incentive to get smaller, more efficient vehicles that we saw last summer.
Since governments at all levels need funding, higher gas taxes seem like one of the best options. And a high tax sets a minimum on gas prices, and so a floor for how inefficient a vehicle people are willing to take. A $0.50 gallon tax, split evenly between states and the fed, would pay for a whole lot of economic recovery, give a stable floor to the value of alternative energy, and still be way cheaper than it was a few months ago. Right now, we're seeing state governments cutting services and payroll at the very time we need an expansionist policy nationwide to avoid deflation. The net effect is the federal government will need to borrow and spent even more money to balance out the state cuts before we can even start climbing out of the hole (if state payrolls drop by 500K, that means the fed employment target from the stimulus plan needs to be 3.5M, not 3.0M, to have the same effect).
I'd much rather see our governor recommend raising the gas tax by $0.25, drop this milage/GPS nonsense, and restore funding to education, get the new I-5 bridge started, etcetera.
My video compression blog
Ok, I think that everyone here is missing the point. You are all being lied to. This is proof positive that the government doesn't really care about taxing gas in order to encourage fuel efficiency. They don't care about cars getting better gas mileage. They don't care about wear and tear on the roads. They don't care about any of the "reasons" they give for creating a new tax. Those "reasons" are actually EXCUSES to tax you some more. They are EXCUSES to put GPS units on your car. They are EXCUSES to take more of your money and to put more controll on your life. The more dependant you are on the government, the more job security and personal power politicians have. So go ahead. Believe that somewhere, somehow even some of this intrusive nonsense is necessary. Argue about it. It's all just a smoke screen. It's just an excuse to make government bigger.
Since hybrids are much lighter (to help achieve better gas mileage), they have much less wear on the road than an SUV.
This miles traveled argument sounds "fair" when you first hear it, but the only benefit it brings is the ability for the State (and Feds) to be able to track every movement of your car. This is a bad idea. The Constitution has already been shit upon for the last 8 years. I am no longer confident it would protect me from abuse by the State Gov't and Feds.
States are always looking to find new ways generate revenue from their citizens. I would first like a better accounting of where all the current money is being spent. It may all be valid, but they sure are generating a lot of revenue already.
If you live in Oregon, please help the Oregon governor make the right decision. You can contact him at:
http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/contact_us.shtml
Thanks
The Three R's of Portland
or
Why Portland Sucks
"Latte Town" was coined a few years back and is the most appropriate term for the City of Portland that I have ever heard. A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface. Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland's dirty little secret is revealed. Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about. Drive through any neighborhood surrounding the downtown area and the impression that you get is that Portland is nothing more than a series of elitist ghettos compromised of rich white homosexuals, rich white yuppies, rich white hippies, rich white trust funders, and rich white kids from the suburbs pretending to be street people. Where's the diversity? Well it doesn't exist but the average Portlander likes the concept and in their eyes the different shades of rich whites all constituent diversity. In a series of articles I will attempt to breakdown and explain these subtle distinctions between the various factions of lily white, latte people that make Portland what it is.
The Artist-Intellectual
The visitor or newcomer to Portland is bound to be struck by the sheer numbers that belong to this group. They seem to be everywhere and are in fact everywhere. They are the reason that all the coffee shops have tables and chairs. The artist-intellectual fancies himself as a poet, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, etc. You get the drift. They spend most of their days idling around the coffee establishments that one finds every 10 feet. They are usually equipped with a notebook that they use for their poems, journals or their artwork. No one ever gets to see the contents of these notebooks. More often than not they have a beaten and weathered paper back copy of some book authored by Kafka or William S. Boroughs. They love to discuss their favorite subject, themselves. Given the opportunity they will prattle on for hours about their poems, art work or the film they are making. You never get to actually see any of their work but you do get to hear about it. Their lives are like one never ending semester in grad school. Initially I believed these losers but then got to thinking. What would an aspiring actor, artist, musician, filmmaker being doing in Portland Oregon, a latte town? Why wouldn't they be in NYC or LA? Because they're phonies, that's why. Here's how it works with these clowns. They flunk out of college in New Jersey so their parents send them to Reed College in Portland in hopes that they will get their act together. They drop out of Reed but stay in Portland while still on Daddy's tab or some trust find. One Saturday Josh or Seth drifts down to one of the hundreds of hippie craft markets downtown. Some hippie is selling didgeridoos that he made I between bong reps. Josh buy one and takes it home where he proceeds to get baked after which he blows a few sour notes into the didgeridoo. The next day he's a musician. Not really but that's what he's telling everyone at the coffee house and pretending is good enough for a Portland artist-intellectual, in fact it's everything. In three months he will switch his designation from musician to filmmaker and then onto to something else 3 months later. As long as it sounds cool he will keep this charade up and no one in his circles will call him on it because they are doing the same thing.
The Activist
This group is usually comprised of people that used to be part of the artist-intellectual group in Portland. They have gotten a little older and may have finally, after 12 years, obtained a liberal arts degree from Portlan
No, really, get a bike, have a way to disconnect the GPS and install a bike computer you can easily reset (for dirt bikes Trail Tech is one). Here in Costa Rica you are allowed to use a bicycle odometer (MTB computers) as far as it displays speed.
I know, I know you need a car to lug your family. dive gear, etc around and have a "normal transportation" when the weather sucks. I agree.
I just feel like this is just another kick in the shin for those who have to travel long distances on a daily basis.
And do not get me wrong, I work 2.5kms from home and whenever weather is better than overcast I ride my motorbike (450cc dirt/enduro bike) which is somewhat more fuel economic, and does not add to traffic jams. In fact I am changing to a 2-3days a week telecommute as well.
I know many cannot do this, but with all the crap governments want to force in your vehicles (and other creepy stuff like lo-jack and on-star even though they have their place in existence), I just want a vehicle I can manipulate the way I want. Not because I am a criminal, but because these are efforts to screw with personal privacy and freedom. The only thing a GPS should do in my car is show me my location, and send me the location if the vehicle is stolen. That is it. I just FREAK out of the idea someone tracking my movement all the time for whatever reason.
totally bullshit
Your post, it makes no sense. Have you ever used a GPS receiver? Mine almost *never* loses signal, and in the mountains you get a great signal.
I can't comment on the mountains, be he/she is right about cities with tall buildings. Driving in New York City with a GPS can be interesting if you're relying on it. Sometimes it can't even make heads or tails of what direction you're moving.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Fucking morons. (1) 1.2 cents per mile REGARDLESS OF CAR TYPE??? This will encourage less efficient vehicles. (2) A gas tax responds to subtler aspects of the same problem: keep your car in good shape, accelerate slowly, take less congested roads, turn the car off at slow red lights, etc... GPS tracking addresses none of this. (3) This would only work with new cars. People should still have to figure out when it makes sense to replace their 10mpg FUV with a Prius. Not that keeping old cars around is a bad thing--manufacturing cars is very energy-intensive--but this system obviates that concern.
This is a tax to reduce congestion, and will be worse than useless as a means to fight pollution. Since gas will be cheaper, more people will drive FUVs due to their perceived safety advantage (incidentally, that "safety advantage" is a lie, but many people are too stupid to check the statistics before they shell out $40k). The law is obviously sponsored by auto manufacturers.
I'd gladly give up all of my rights to privacy if we could solve global warming. Let's have some perspective here. When every country declares martial law due to resource wars, what do you think will happen to your privacy?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I just stopped driving in Oregon. I'll go around thanks. Don't buy your new car there either cause it'll cost you an extra 200 bucks for that fancy (read crappy) GPS unit they will require. I won't drive through the state, I won't drive in the state I won't live in the state.
Why bother
>No, that is just an urban legend.
>Even Ferris fell for that once...
No, it's not just an urban legend, but you need to consider cars more than 30 or so years old. I don't know if the Ferrari in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" would be old enough.
When I was quite young, in the early 60s, my father drove the family Karmann Ghia in reverse partway home, in order to show me an odometer reading of 55,555.
A quick web search turned up this page:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3667671.html
which indicates that patents for one-way odometers were being issued in 1970.
Lets get rid of that clunky old gas tax in favor of tracking every vehicle in the state's mileage by a state mandated GPS tracking device!
It's a tax collection device not a way to keep tabs on our citizens we swear!
=-D
1. Give 20 million to your political cronies for "R & D" on the new tax.
2. Generate publicity that creates a huge public furor over privacy issues.
3. Wait until even your fiscally conservative opponents are railing that you should just increase the fuel tax.
4. Make a big deal about "listening to the people", then cancel the unworkable plan, raise taxes and make everyone happy.
5. Profit!
Wow. The ggp most likely did not mean "driving in reverse", rather that old odometers are easy to tinker. So I was just joking, I didn't imagine there were actually cars with odometers counting down in reverse! Interesting... :)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Hey folks. I wrote a blog post about this subject and got a reply from Betsy Imholt, the administrator for the pilot program mentioned in the article.
Her reply is somewhat lengthy, so I won't repost the whole thing here (a lot of it basically amounts to a press release).
If you're interested, you can read it here.
You should probably quote a different article, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world
which looks at what the average person pays, rather than the maximum possible tax rate for the wealthiest people in the country.
Granted, it still shows that personal tax in the Netherlands is still about 10% higher than that in the US, but it's about 15% lower than the 52% in the article you quoted.
Interestingly for me, I note that Australia has a lower average tax burden (both individual and corporate) than the US. And people here complain about high taxes compared to the US! I guess they don't consider that you guys have to pay both state and federal income tax, plus state sales taxes that in some cases are higher than our GST (= VAT) at 10%.
Oh, and we have free health care. :-P
Sounds like pork for some GPS manufacturer to me.
Never mind all the social problems with such a plan - they could save a ton of money by simply recording odometer readings with each safety inspection (presuming oregon has safety inspections) and then taxing the owner based on that. Sure, you'd still be taxed for out of state driving but big deal - if those states inact driving taxes they won't be double-dipping since you only get a safety inspection in your home state.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Tracking me against my will is something I don't like, no matter what your excuse is.
This stupid plan will be way too expensive, and will fail miserably.
For some odd reason, I just know there are going to be reception problems with the vehicle mounted GPS. (Wow, I didn't know having that speaker wire there would futz up the GPS system... Are you sure that broken wire is the antenna for the GPS? The car hasn't had any problems that I can find... How was I supposed to know that's the power lead to the GPS, I'm not a mechanic, why don't you ask the mechanic what happened.)
Yeah, Because a Prius does the same amount of damage to the roads as say a Ford F350.
This is just stupid. The existing system is just fine. If he wants to fix the budget shortfalls he needs to do something to increase the states normal source of income aka income taxes. Increase jobs somehow, and the problem will be solved. Oregon is one of the worst places to run a business, and as such its hard to promote job growth here.
and Yes i live in Oregon.
Governor Taxandgougeme can blow me.
Though the locations provided through GPS are accurate, they're not perfect. For a vehicle traveling at highway speeds the distance traveled between each reading is great, and inaccuracies are tiny in comparison. At lower speeds the ratio of the distances becomes closer. At a stop there will still be a slight location difference detected on each interval.
Somebody primarily traveling via city streets or during rush hour would be charged for tiny extra distances over time; considering Oregon's population the state will be scraping off a nice bonus from building reflections etc.
Yes, I've used a GPS receiver. In fact, I've used two different GPS receivers---one by Garmin, one by Tom Tom. Neither works reliably when you have a rock cliff next to you. I've gotten results that suddenly jump by as much as a quarter mile. If you're using that for distance calculations, your travel just increased by half a mile.
You're attacking my minor points while completely ignoring the main point.... My main point was that GPS is A. frequently inaccurate, B. a really bad way of determining how far you have driven, C. has the potential for being a serious privacy violation, and D. presents a huge infrastructure cost, both in terms of every gas station having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to replace or retrofit their pumps and in terms of every single vehicle in the entire U.S. costing hundreds of dollars extra. And all of this so that Oregon can get what will probably average out at $1-200 per hybrid vehicle sold spread over the lifetime of the vehicle. In what sane universe does that make ANY sense?
That said, if you're that bothered by having to do a little extra work on your taxes, you could always have your state charge a hybrid title tax. Charge $100 for every ten MPG over 30 MPG. You'll end up bringing in the same amount of money, but the cost to the general public will be far, far less.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
!liberty
This is the same state that allows triple semi trailers when the truck pays an 'overweight tax'. Oh yeah, and the every 3 year tax rebate written into state law by popular vote. Instead of saving excess capital and using it for projects, they are forced to pay $$$ back to the people... the 'kicker'. Our Governor is a little overzealous here and I intend to send him a little note letting him know that his idea is ridiculous.
The other major flaw in this idea is that our state is not all like Portland, with all these hippies living in dense clusters. The majority of the state is spread out, rural high desert areas. This mileage tax would disproportionately affect rural residents. Clearly this move panders to only a certain portion of the populace, besides the fact that it is stupid.
In fact, divorce lawyers have been known to successfully subpoena records of highway toll transponders (EZ-Pass), to produce evidence of the driver going someplace where they may have been having an affair.
The whole GPS tracking thing is pure Big Brother, and I don't mean the TV show.
The Three R's of Portland
or
Why Portland Sucks
"Latte Town" was coined a few years back and is the most appropriate term for the City of Portland that I have ever heard. A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface. Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland's dirty little secret is revealed. Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about. Drive through any neighborhood surrounding the downtown area and the impression that you get is that Portland is nothing more than a series of elitist ghettos compromised of rich white homosexuals, rich white yuppies, rich white hippies, rich white trust funders, and rich white kids from the suburbs pretending to be street people. Where's the diversity? Well it doesn't exist but the average Portlander likes the concept and in their eyes the different shades of rich whites all constituent diversity. In a series of articles I will attempt to breakdown and explain these subtle distinctions between the various factions of lily white, latte people that make Portland what it is.
The Artist-Intellectual
The visitor or newcomer to Portland is bound to be struck by the sheer numbers that belong to this group. They seem to be everywhere and are in fact everywhere. They are the reason that all the coffee shops have tables and chairs. The artist-intellectual fancies himself as a poet, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, etc. You get the drift. They spend most of their days idling around the coffee establishments that one finds every 10 feet. They are usually equipped with a notebook that they use for their poems, journals or their artwork. No one ever gets to see the contents of these notebooks. More often than not they have a beaten and weathered paper back copy of some book authored by Kafka or William S. Boroughs. They love to discuss their favorite subject, themselves. Given the opportunity they will prattle on for hours about their poems, art work or the film they are making. You never get to actually see any of their work but you do get to hear about it. Their lives are like one never ending semester in grad school. Initially I believed these losers but then got to thinking. What would an aspiring actor, artist, musician, filmmaker being doing in Portland Oregon, a latte town? Why wouldn't they be in NYC or LA? Because they're phonies, that's why. Here's how it works with these clowns. They flunk out of college in New Jersey so their parents send them to Reed College in Portland in hopes that they will get their act together. They drop out of Reed but stay in Portland while still on Daddy's tab or some trust find. One Saturday Josh or Seth drifts down to one of the hundreds of hippie craft markets downtown. Some hippie is selling didgeridoos that he made I between bong reps. Josh buy one and takes it home where he proceeds to get baked after which he blows a few sour notes into the didgeridoo. The next day he's a musician. Not really but that's what he's telling everyone at the coffee house and pretending is good enough for a Portland artist-intellectual, in fact it's everything. In three months he will switch his designation from musician to filmmaker and then onto to something else 3 months later. As long as it sounds cool he will keep this charade up and no one in his circles will call him on it because they are doing the same thing.
The Activist
This group is usually comprised of people that used to be part of the artist-intellectual group in Portland. They have gotten a little older and may have finally, after 12 years, obtained a liberal arts degree from Portlan
This won't work. What about people from out of state? What about people fiddling with the devices? What about privacy issues? I have a better and much simpler idea. Get rid of the per gallon or per mile idea entirely and take the funds out of the state's general sales tax revenue fund, the way it should be anyway. The whole idea of sales tax from the beginning of the nation was that when you buy something, it wouldn't have gotten to you had the infrastructure (like roads) not been there. People traveling through the state go to hotels, eat at restaurants, etc, so they'll pay their fare shair of the mileage they're putting on the roads. There are no privacy issues. And it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to cheat on sales taxes. All problems solved.
Isnt that what we pay gas taxes for? This is a slimey way to increase taxes but not to add it to the gasoline tax. In case you didnt know, jackass governor, anyone subject to that absurd tax would be purchasing gas.
People see right thru this shit.
No, the point is to provide revenue for the government, and depending on your ideological leanings, either use the market system to encourage conservation or unreasonably distort price levels and mess up the market with all of your unwarranted government intervention.
As far as taxation goes, being even roughly proportional is about as good as it gets, and the gas tax is pretty close to proportionate to road usage and wear and tear, within some fudge factors. It's as close or closer to proportional than any of the alternatives, and has the added benefit of being much simpler to administer than anything else that's even close.
There is no perfect solution, and holding out for one is an open invitation to screw things up. So, unless you're planning to set up a labyrinthine bureaucratic/technical hell of graduated usage fees for any given stretch of road... stop worrying about the poor, sad lawnmower/offroad gas consumers who constitute an insignificant fraction of the whole. Even if they're not causing wear and tear on public roads, lawnmowers tend to have nasty emissions and offroad travel tends to cause other problems.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
If you drive, you use tires. Whether your vehicle runs on gasoline, french fry oil, chicken feathers, or moonbeams, the more you drive, the sooner you have to buy new tires. The heavier your vehicle, the more wear and tear you put on the roads, and higher weight-rated tires can be taxed at a higher rate.
As an added benefit driving of the type considered "unsafe" or "unwise" usually chews up tires faster, so these people will either contribute more or adjust their driving accordingly, so society benefits either way.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
What about ye old fashioned odometer?
It's pretty much already a crime in most places to tamper with them.
In New Zealand we have a Road User Charges system that applies to Commercial Diesel powered vehicles. This replaces tax on the pump price with a prepaid distance system and periodic verification of your vehicles odometer mileage. No need to track via GPS or anything so difficult to implement. It is also fairer when these taxes are redirected to infrastructure. You use roads more, you pay more.
Not to mention that it robs people of part of the incentive to drive gas efficient cars.
If you tax the miles instead of the gallons, the gas guzzlers get a break and the economy cars take a hit by getting charged for more miles for the same gallon of gas.
I smell the presence of big oil in this shift.
Yes, all targeted tax collection is simply forced "wealth transfer" hidden behind yet another name.
Is there a non-targeted form of tax collection you're offering as an alternative :).
Taxation is necessary to pay for public good and services that would otherwise be unfunded. Taxation is also appropriate to fund activities that are more efficiently done by government than without it.
Given that, there's a couple of different axes to figure out: what's the minimum level of taxation to provide a balanced budget over the business cycle with appropriate spending (governments should run a surplus in good times and a deficit in bad times), and what's the right combination of taxes that provides that revenue with a minimal amount of friction to economic growth and other goals. That's why cigarette and gas taxes are a good thing, as they provide revenue while discouraging behavior we want to discourage. If you need to get revenue from somewhere, that's a whole lot better than many alternatives.
An example of a really bad tax would be a gross receipts tax, since it's painful to administer, and hugely distorting as it massively rewards vertical integration, driving out smaller innovative companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_receipts_tax
Inheritance taxes are another good one. Lots of people seem to hate them for some reason, but it seems like the dead will find being taxes more than most, and enabling the decedents of wealth to remain wealthy without any economic input of their own for generations seems the wrong incentive for future wealth generation.
Anyway, there's often a knee-jerk attitude that all taxes are equally bad, and no tax should ever be added or raised, even to offset lowering other taxes. But we need taxes, and there's differences between them, so we should develop as optimal a tax system as we can.
My video compression blog
Instead of putting all the transmitters, receivers and coax into a vault, install it in the Governor's office and home (the one he spends the most time in), and make sure all RF this shit generates is piped in unshielded, cooks his brain all the way down to his scrotum.
Throw in a free microwave oven! Nice healthy cooking.
Ignoring the obvious waste of spectrum, where are the GPS's going to be made?
OREGON? OR CHINA?!
Let me guess...
I don't know about Oregon, but when I lived in New Jersey they tried to change the gas-pumping law, so I got to see what the politics around it were.
A few years back in was in NJ on business, and pulled into a gas station to refill my car. The guy said his guy who pumped gas was on lunch break and wouldn't be back for 10 minutes, so I went and pumped my gas, having forgotten that that was highly illegal, and he yelled at me when I went to pay. Fortunately, I didn't blow up the gas station or force anybody's grandma out into the cold and snow while I was there :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you want to collect taxes based on the mileage everybody drives, you can either use several hundred dollars worth of gear to retrofit every car and spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars building a Big Brother monitoring infrastructure that doesn't succeed in tracking out-of-state cars, or you can collect the odometer reading every year when the taxpayer is paying their car registration. Sounds like an obvious choice to me.
If you want to collect money in ways that are more progressive than the gas tax, which disproportionately affects poor people who can't afford to buy Priuses, you can raise the state income tax instead. (The gas tax also disproportionately affects SUV owners, but they knew that when they bought their toys.) It'd be a lot cheaper to implement, and raise more money, and it's more honest.
If the problem is that the state has a complex hokey rule-bound system for allocating taxes between different levels of governments and between different cost centers within the state government, I suppose you could try to fix it by adding a new complex privacy-invading bureaucratic system using untested technology and requiring retrofit of all the cars in the state. On the other hand, you could try to fix the system instead of making it worse, or you could just raise the bloody income tax yet again and claim you're saving the state money by avoiding the Location Tax.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Disclaimer: Though I work for ODOT and know several people involved with the road user fee program, I am not personally involved and do not speak for ODOT or the State of Oregon.
A lot of the concerns about privacy and the impact on the acceptance of alternative fuel vehicles are addressed in this page.
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/RUFPP/mileage.shtml
I have been following this project in the media since before I worked for ODOT. My initial reaction was horror at the shortsightedness of what I thought would be a impediment to alternative and high mileage vehicles, and an instinctive distrust of the privacy implications. On actually reading about the program my privacy concerns have been addressed. With proper structuring this program doesn't need to be an impediment to alternative vehicles, so the question is how you believe it will be managed. Thanks partially to Oregon's incentives, Oregon already has the highest adoption rate of hybrid vehicle ownership in the US, and Governor Kulongoski is proposing similar incentives for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles. Despite my initial skepticism, I think Oregon has a pretty good track record for awareness of these issues.
Detailed information can be found on the above link, but for a short overview of conserns about the road use program I can pass this along from the program's administrator:
-----------------------
I'm the administrator for the Road User Fee Pilot Program at ODOT. I understand that there is concern over Oregon's interest in a mileage fee. However, there is a few things I would like to explain.
Oregon is preparing to replace the gas tax when it no longer will be a adequate revenue source to fund our roads. Cars will be on the market next year that will get over 100 miles per gallon. This is great news for the environment but problematic for road funding. Knowing this problem is coming, Oregon has led the nation in developing possible solutions. Charging by the mile rather than by the gallon is one possible solution.
With that said, Oregon has worked through the details of developing a mileage fee system over the last seven years at the direction of the Road User Fee Task Force. Like you, the Task Force shared many of your concerns which we have addressed though our work as described below.
Privacy. ODOT was directed by the task force to protect the privacy of Oregonians while developing the mileage fee system. The mileage counting device that was designed for the study receives a GPS signal (much like a television or radio receives signals) to locate itself but does not transmit a signal. Therefore, there is no ability for anyone's car to be tracked. The mileage counter tallies miles driven within Oregon and does not create a travel history. A mileage fee could be charged without the use of GPS but the downside would be that Oregonians would be charged for miles driven out of state, something the task force wanted to avoid.
No retrofitting. ODOT's mileage fee concept does not include installing any devices in existing cars. Instead we propose that auto companies equip the vehicles at manufacturing much like they already do with other government mandated standards like seat belts and emission controls.
Fairness. Some people assume all vehicles will pay the same mileage fee rate and this would be unfair to drivers of fuel efficient vehicles. This may not be true because the rates and structure have yet to be decided. A flat rate of one cent per mile was used for the pilot study however the rate could differ for different types of vehicles.
Rural motorists. Rural motorists could gain under a mileage fee proposal depending on how it is structured. Because we know that rural Oregonians drive larger, less fuel efficient vehicles, they are already paying more in gas taxes for driving the same miles than their urban counterparts. If the mileage fee was a flat rate, like one cent per mile like in the pilot test, rural drivers would actually pas LESS.
Instead of a $.50/gallon tax instituted at once, I'd like to see it gradually increase.
Say by +$.10/gallon per year for the first 10 years.
That gives both consumers, companies and manufacturers time to switch.
In addition, I'd like to see a "floor" on gasoline prices -- say $1.75/gallon, adjusted for inflation.
If gas goes below $1.75/gallon before the $.10/gallon/year tax, the government taxes it until it goes up to $1.75. This prevents market flucuations from creating artificially-low long term average mpg.
Remember ten years ago when gas was $1.30?
Well, I paid less than than that a week ago...
Gas had to *triple* in price before driving decreased, and driving decreased by under three percent.
Three percent sounds like a small amount but that all comes out of, like I said, the excess use - tourism and extra driving. It has a disproportionate impact to the economy beyond a sheer percentage of a single persons overall driving.
That's even more true these days when people have very long commutes and so recreational driving becomes a very small percentage of total miles driven.
But still, even if it were true that a gas tax hike would result in less driving, we could have a spirited discussion about whether that was good or bad.
It's bad for the economy because people will not travel as far. It's bad for the culture because people become more insular. It's bad for the environment because people care about the environment less if it's only an abstract and not a place they go. It's bad even for people that stay at home because gas tax increases raise the price of all products, with a disproportionate impact on the poor.
To some degree you need a gas tax to help maintain public roads, but beyond whatever is needed for that you have more negatives than positives and communities use excess gas taxes as crutches to support waste in government spending. A lot of governments are sweating now because they relied on gas prices being high so the amount they skimmed off the top was also high. When you tie budgets to such a volatile product you are going to end up in trouble.
Travel broadens the mind, so you should not be so cavalier about the effects of even a seemingly small reduction in travel that people partake of.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded.
Cars too efficient? This imaginary problem would be a good one to have if it ever actually came to be. And it would be easily solved by raising the fuel tax by tiny fractions to compensate, further encouraging higher efficiency.
Technology isn't the answer to all problems, and this complicated, expensive proposal isn't even close.
Now that you all have EXPRESSED Yourselves HERE, GO do it to this governor on his website. your comments HERE account for NOTHING... I'll even make it EASY, here is the link : http://www.oregon.gov/Gov/contact_us.shtml
So what if GPS is used by law enforcement to check alibis? Isn't that a good thing? Why do so many people feel that they have a right to break the law?
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
If all the good people leave, all you have left is...
Democrats?
But, but, but they tell me their intentions are good.
They already collect .25 ? cents a Gallon in tax - for Every single Gallon of gas - sold all across the state -
in every city and small town - every single day.
Anyone want to add that up ?
Methinks the Gov needs to learn to live within budget and stop coming up with new and expensive ways to pull
money from peoples wallets.
Sheesh, it's no wonder 'We the People' don't have any money left to spend to bolster the economy.
The rich and our governments have taken it all.
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
I only know about Dutch tax rates
Looking at the income tax, you can see it's nicely staggered. In practice, I pay almost 40% income tax. Everything I buy, and every service I use, takes VAT of 19%, except for foods and related services, which is 6%.
A car is still the money-farm for the Dutch government. To buy a car, you get a list price. In my case, a car had a list price of about 14k euro's. Then I have to pay:
- BPM: 42.3% of the list price. Unjustified tax, just goes into the main government pot.
- VAT: 19% over the list price plus BPM.
Total cost: 14000*1.423*1.19 = 23707, which makes it 59% tax, to buy a vehicle. With my wages, which have already been taxed for almost 40%. Or my savings, which are also taxed for 1.2% a year if they're big enough.
Then we have to pay road tax, and gasoline. Gas is currently cheap at EUR 1,18 per liter or so, or US$6.28 per US Gallon, about 70% of which is also tax.
In car-related taxes, about 17 billion euro's were collected, of which about 4 billion were spent on our overly congested public road system (in repairs. The road quality is generally good, the planning and scalability aren't)
I'd say we pay more than you Leftpondians :-)
Yes, i really want my gov't to have access 24-7 to a GPS on my car. Will they also automatically ticket me if i'm speeding?
I have yet to see any ludicrous videos of cops on the side of texan roads sucking at gas tanks with tubes.
So what this is is a built-in tax evasion capacity.
Very much in the texan character, but im just saying it's not a very enforceable law.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Lol... hear, hear! Yeah, how long has it been since the I5 bridge was made... or even worked on? The bridge is way too narrow for the traffic and has been for decades! I205 doesn't off-balance it because it's ten or more miles away! Granted, around ten miles once or twice isn't a big deal but five days a week, four or so weeks a month, twelve months a year... that's serious cash going to gas! Not to mention, the OR schools really need the cash. Whenever the state doesn't have enough money (which is quite often) they take it away from the school funds before anything.
A Democrat who thinks the answer to everything is raising taxes! Imagine that!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ok, as to "tracking all movements of all cars" that is obviously not going to happen. The only way this would be enforceable would be in conjunction with the registration process for cars.
A) you implement the tax .012 and add that to the bill for registration. Easy, clean, simple to implement, no mass tracking...
B) first time you register your car after the tax is implemented the state takes down the odometer reading and stores it in a DB with the VIN
C) Next year when you register again, take reading again, compare to last years reading, subtract, multiply by
It's really a pretty minimal tax if you drive 20k miles in a year its only $240. I don't even drive 20k miles in a year and I drive more than most people I know.
With this and what the New York state governor is doing you can bet alot of angry conservatives and moderates will get together to vote these clowns out.
This is political suicide as many people who are forced to commute long distances thanks to greedy home owners raising the prices of homes near work will now have to pay more $$$ in taxes in addition to high gas prices.
Oregon has very strong anti tax groups which have successfully defeated any income tax proposal time and time again with riots.
Taxing is not the answer even if their is a budget deficit.
http://saveie6.com/
Heavy trucks do bring many consumer items to stores. But the true damage is done by very heavy trucks like coal, gravel and cement trucks, among others.
I saw a report from WV that coal trucks routinely caught at double or triple the weight limit of up to 80,000lbs; one caught at 190,000lbs. These companies routinely and historically break the law (and likely do the most damage to roads).
I have no proof, but I believe that bridges and roadways are way overbuilt and are much more expensive because these industries lobby and get less weight restrictions, externalizing their costs to the taxpayer. Where is the correct break even point? For whom?
Yes. That's it. ... make them pay.
A hot air tax on creepy politicians.
Every time they open their big mouths
Now THAT will certainly lower the global temperature too.
Problems solved.
RR
I live in rural Oregon, the area potentially most affected by this. Rural area people are the worst off economically now, since the state sold and then squandered most of our resources called ONC funds based on the wholesale timber sale years ago, now complains it is broke, um, no kidding? Sustainability of its forest resources is the long term solution, rather than the pillage-the-forests days of yore. Now the people have to try to figure out how to pay for the sins of those who have long since cashed out. Good luck to the Governor, people here will never put up with GPS trackers.
Wouldn't the service station still need to collect the federal gas tax? There would be two completely different systems at work, trying to accomplish essentially the same goal (collecting highway taxes). Government efficiency at its finest!
Didn't Oregon secede or something? I read that somewhere. It's a pretty left wing area, isn't it, especially Portland? This thing should trigger spontaneous orgasms with those folks. The love The Machine as much as the neocons.
"The justification for the gas tax is that your tax is proportional to your usage of the infrastructure"
No, it's that your tax is proportional to your usage of GAS.
Everything else is your assumption, not fact.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Hello,
As an Oregon resident who likes to go geo-caching let me just say this is a joke. The GPS isn't going to be able to track a large percentage of miles because it won't have a signal due to trees and hills.
It would work well on I-5, or any highway system, but once you get into the rural areas good luck!
I say sounds like a good idea if we just used it to tax Semi trucks or vehicles that stick to the main roads.
look i liked the comments about how you should tax lawnmowers and chainsaws while there at it, but you guys don't get it. stop trying to do the math to figure out which way people should be taxed so it would be cheaper, and people pay way more in taxes then you think, look at all the surcharges on you phone, cable, internet, and pretty much every service you want that you can purchase THEY CAN AND WILL TRY TO TAX TO DEATH, they are taxes, we should focus on reducing federal, state, and local spending, then there would be no need to be taxed as much. you all have to realize that every time the government taxes you in one form of another (income tax, sales tax, surcharges, etc) that they take away your buying power in the economy, and make you only purchase the necessitates that you need just to live, if you had more money to spend with lower taxes you could spend that money on things that are not necessitates to help drive the economy forward. because innovative goods drive the economy not plain just to live goods. taxation is also a for of control, they want to stop you from driving a vehicle that would consume more gas. Just think THE COST TO DRIVE IS NOT ONLY GOING TO GO UP. HOW DO U THINK THESE TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE GOING TO HAVE TO COMPENSATE FOR THE INCREASED COSTS IN THE FOR OF TAXES, THEY WILL RAISE PRICES WHICH IS ALSO A TAX TO YOU!!!!!!!!! and the cost of just NECESSITATES WILL GO UP!!!! you need to stop treating the symptoms and treat the problem of taxation, figure out a way to get rid of them permanently and not play a shuffle game!!
GPS tracking is a no go. It's also a stupid and rather extreme proposal. Just raise (or apply, if they don't have one) the sales tax on the purchase/lease of cars. Then charge more for tag renewal. Next, charge more for inspection stickers. Finally, charge more for the gas tax. All of these taxes but the gas tax can be varied by the weight of the vehicle to keep them fair. For even more precision, they can be varied by the MPG of the vehicle too.
Has anybody noticed whether, without correction, Bush had an underbite? Or maybe hemophilia?
Just increase the Gas Tax then. This GPS tracking idea is expensive both in money and personal privacy, and it's best to tax what hurts the country anyway. Keep incentivizing fuel efficiency and we'll keep seeing better efficient cars. Duh.
Eh... wrongo... - some may be purchasing diesel.. some hydrogen, some bio-diesel, some ethanol...
definitely not all GAS you retard =) - sorry for insulting all the retards out there by classifying this jackass in that group...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Another California native here to second this--I have lots of family in Texas and have taken several road trips through the south from Texas to Georgia/the Carolinas.
I have one thing to add though: the food is fuckin' awesome in most of the South. Heart-attack inducing, but delicious.