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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."
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)
And GPS drops out from time to time. What's the state going to do to people who "accidentily" build a faraday cage around the antenna?
Not a typewriter
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.
Well that's the point, isn't it... well, maybe.
Not sure about the USA, but in NL you pay all sorts of taxes on gas (one of the highest in the world) + a road use tax. Both go toward, among other, road maintenance as well.
As cars get more efficient in terms of gas use, the gov't wallet slims down.. but given the same car in terms of e.g. weight, footprint (literal - i.e. tires-on-road), it doesn't matter whether you're super-efficient or the worst gas guzzler in the world... you're still putting the same wear-and-tear on that road. Ergo, they have to..
A. increase gas prices more
B. increase road use taxes more
C. create a new (context-dependent) per-mile (kilometer) tax
D. go with a bit of A, drop B and implement C -and- add an entirely new tax that -everybody- pays.. whether you actually drive a car or not, as dropping B does not get compensated enough by A and C.
Of course they spin this as a positive thing, as those who drive a lot will now pay more, while those who drive say 20,000km/year will be off much cheaper... thanks in part to those driving 0km/year helping pay. ho hum.
( not that I'm fervently opposed to it - my goods are delivered by road, so even if I don't travel on it.. transport companies do - but I was under the impression I already paid for transportation cost by paying for the product. hmpf. )
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.
I have heard (but can't seem to verify via google etc) that road damage goes up with the fourth power of vehicle weight, with the square of the speed and (naturally) linearly with miles travelled. So, to get people to pay proportional to the amount of road work needed, if I pay $1 for my car, a semi (with reasonable assumptions about speed and miles travelled) should be paying $500,000 or more - the weight is by far the largest factor and when multiplied by number of miles travelled gets big quickly. For lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles the numbers would be even larger.
This kind of tax, then, would penalize most drivers and essentially subsidize the trucking industry even more than is currently the case.
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
Gas is not that inelastic. When the price of gas hit $4/gal., I got a bus pass. There's a park-and-ride right by my house, and the express goes straight downtown to where I work. And I now spend 25 minutes each way on leisure reading rather than fighting traffic. Now that gas is cheap, I still ride the bus. Basically, whoever decided to put on the squeeze made a permanent convert. I probably won't ever go back to driving myself. Between gas and parking, I save $200 to $300 a month and I save myself lots of trouble.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
GPS unit 1341235423523 bought 50 gallons of gas but only drove 50 miles per the GPS. Odd that Prius is only getting 1 MPG.
Aside from extreme examples, I look forward to watching tax agents bust down doors of people whom have poorly maintained cars because they "must" be tax cheats. My old 1980's plymouth horizon got 30 MPG on a good day, but when the choke stuck during winter I was lucky to get double digit MPGs on short trips.
I suspect the next step is location based taxes. For example parking a car within 500 feet of a church is free, yet anyone whom parks within 500 feet of an adult video stores will have their visit documented on a public web site and charged a $50 parking fee. Or anyone whom doesn't attend / park nearby a church every week will pay a higher tax "Y".
Then of course there are the known tobacco smokers whom drive within X feet of a public school where it's illegal to have or use tobacco products within X feet. Or gunowners. Etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What I don't get is this: why in h*ll would they put a privacy-violating GPS device in to count mileage when:
Even if we assume that the GPS will merely be used to determine where you are, half the Oregon borders are in the mountains, so you may well find yourself getting billed for miles not driven within the state. Not to mention that you're probably adding a couple hundred bucks to the cost of every automobile, all for the sole purpose of giving the government more revenue.
To add insult to injury, at 1.2 cents per mile, you would have to go almost 17,000 extra miles in that hybrid beyond what you would have gotten on that amount of fuel in a non-hybrid car. With typical hybrids getting maybe 5-10% higher MPG on average, the break-even point is when the car has gone between 170k and 340k miles. If everybody just paid that same $200 to the state as a tax on the sale of a new vehicle, it would give the state probably twice as much money as they would make off of this, all for the same cost to the consumer, all without violating people's privacy.
Here's a more sane proposal: when you apply for your tags, make one line on the form be the current odometer reading. Charge an additional license fee based on the mileage. Once the vehicle starts going in for smog checks, this can be corroborated by periodic reporting by the smog check station, so there's low risk of significant cheating.
Allow people who do a substantial amount of out-of-state driving to apply for a tax credit on his/her personal income tax for driving outside the state. Require them to provide some corroborating evidence (receipts from out of state hotels or gas stations during the period in question, pay stubs proving an out-of-state job, etc.).
By making the small percentage of people who regularly drive outside the state spend an extra ten minutes filling out their income tax forms, you save the cost of additional hardware in new vehicles, additional hardware at the pumps (the cost of which will be paid by everyone), etc. and you avoid all the privacy questions. More to the point, since all new cars sold anywhere would then have to have these devices (since car makers won't build a separate model just for Oregon, even if these GPS devices only cost $100, my plan will save almost 2 billion dollars annually nationwide in unnecessary hardware when compared with the Oregon governor's plan.
Just to put that number in perspective, that's billion with a 'B'---enough money to bail out on the order of 20,000 home owners who are defaulting on their mortgages. Anyone in favor of something so asinine should be publicly flogged.... The people of Oregon deserve someone with better math and problem solving skills than this....
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My jaw dropped when I saw that page. Until I saw "The quoted income tax rate is, except where noted, the top rate of tax: Most jurisdictions have lower rate of taxes for low levels of income."
That was the difference between the stated 54.3% that page states and my 18% taxes paid.
I live in Norway BTW, which arguably has one of the best healtcare systems in the world.
So it's not a fantasy. It's a reality.
In Pennsylvania, they do the reverse, the put the dye in the taxed diesel. It actually works better. It doesn't matter how much diesel the supplier has, they pay tax on a certain amount and the state monitors how much dye they use. The tricky part is that vendors who sell the untaxed stuff retail are not allowed to have pumps that are capable of dispensing directly into a vehicle (primarily accomplished by making the hose too short to reach).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.