Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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...
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...
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
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
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?
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.
That is a very good point. My original question disregarded non-essential travel, imagining fuel as a fixed-consumption good. This is what I meant when I referred to it as a 'staple;' I'm unfortunately failing to recall the term for a good with an inflexible rate of consumption.
However, even though fuel is not fixed-consumption, it seems that this policy would also depress travel; taxing the mileage should discourage people from traveling in a similar way to taxing the fuel.
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?"
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
Sounds like the opposite of taxation without representation. I don't live in Oregon, but with this proposal I can drive through the place and pay less tax than the locals. Woohoo!
Oregon is weird. They've outlawed self service at gas stations. Since I don't care to pay to have some high school klutz spill gas on the ground when filling up my tank, I make sure to gas up across the border whenever I do go that way.
Just watch out for the sales tax on the motel room. The whole nation has got on the bandwagon of screwing the traveler with extra taxes on motels, rental cars, and all the stuff only visitors need. Now that's taxation without representation.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Exactly. It's essentially a subsidy for inefficient vehicles.
Hands in my pocket
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?
Bad news man.
The idea is being kicked around for car registration
stickers to contain an RFID chip.
Imagine a world where your car can be tracked
anywhere, anytime on any road. By placing sensors
at pre-determined intervals, they can calculate
your speed and auto-mail a ticket if you exceed it
at any time.
A police cruiser outfitted with RFID readers can
scan cars at a scary rate simply by driving by
them. Bounce that tag number against a database
and it will alert the officer of any violations
the car has ( or it's owners ) in damn near real
time.
Of course a hand held stun-gun of a few hundred :D
thousand volts will do wonders to that RFID chip,
but don't be surprised to see it coming to a
car near you
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
--
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?
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.
Taxing travel depresses travel. Taxing fuel depresses inefficient travel more than efficient travel.
Now which seems to make more sense?
-josh
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.
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
Leave it to Oregon...
They are interesting indeed. They have no sales tax but do have an income tax. Voters have rejected a sales tax like 12 bazillion times.
The state is broke and needs more money desperately. Watching legislators looking for new ways to increase tax revenue isn't new for Oregonians - it's normal.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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!
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
None of your gas pumps have canopies over them?
I don't recall the last time I saw an operating gas station without a canopy.
Grandma. Your Grandma - Making consumers pump gas would mean that your grandma is going to have to get out of the car into the snow on her walker to pump her gas, because most gas stations won't have Full Service, and the ones that do will charge far more than for self serve and your grandma won't be able to afford it. Yes, the newspapers really do get letters like that any time they propose changing the law. New Jersey's full-serve gas is almost always cheaper than self-serve across the border in PA or NY; I suspect Oregon's isnt'. (Here in California, gas stations have to pump gas for handicapped people for no extra charge, but our gas taxes are about 50 cents higher than most of the country's, so grandma's still getting ripped off.)
Actually, this isn't an issue at all. In WA state, they don't do the required pumping service. Several gas stations have the self or service pump option. You could seriously throw a rock and hit one. The price for pumping service (if you're not elderly or disabled) still makes gas cheaper in WA than OR (and OR has the enforced pumping service). Elderly and disabled can get free pumping service in WA... Not only does a handicap permit allow this to happen but also a drivers' license showing you are at such an age or older works just as well. Granted, I don't know if any of this has changed...
why don't we let the free market work and demand more fuel efficient vehicles instead of using compulsion and coercion through laws and regulations set by the government. if you look what happened when the price of gas went up the car companies started building smaller more fuel efficient cars.