Pay-Per-Mile Tax....

[Rustic Eagle]

I woke up to the following article on my CNN home page........, time to change my home page.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/18/travel...html?hpt=hp_c1

Bob

[Lady Fitzgerald]

A per mile fuel tax just doesn't make sense. It would be too expensive. A new government infrastructure would have to be created just to monitor people's mileage and bill the tax. Even though the article claims the fuel tax is not working because fuel consumption is down due to vehicles being more efficient, raising fuel taxes would be much a more efficent way to recover the loss in tax revenue than creating another inefficient beauracracy to track mileage and collect the mileage tax. The argument that increasing fuel price by increasing fuel taxes would discourage people from traveling as much, thus further reducing the amount of tax collected, doesn't really apply here since a mileage tax would have the same effect.

One could argue a higher fuel tax is unfair because vehicles that use more fuel per mile would have to pay more taxes. However, that argument would hold little water because the reason most vehicles use more fuel is because they are heavier which causes more wear and tear on the roads. In the case of diesels, fuel taxes are already tiered by weight. Diesel fuel at passenger pumps in many States (AZ is one) is taxed differently from the fuel pumped at the big rig pumps, usually based on the number of axles and overall weight.

All electric vehicles could have a flat tax added to annual registration fees to recover revenue lost because they do not pay fuel taxes. Or, in States that already have an annual inspection for emissions or safety could require all electric vehicles to also be inspected to monitor mileage and report the mileage to the taxing agencies. Very little added infrastructure would be needed to administer the tax, mostly improved computer programming.

[JPBeck]

Nothing like a little double dipping taxes.

[clutch]

I believe it is to make the hybrid and electric car drivers pay their fair share. Cost per mile by weight would be just about as fair as the gas tax is because heavier vehicles generally buy more gas per mile.

Of course the government transportation department will want to keep the gas tax and add the other. The first job of all departments of government is go grow each year. God forbid that any would be phased out of existence.

[Seann45]

OK unless they put a GPS in each vehicle it would be impossible to track... and people would just disable the power feed to the gps. and just reading the odometer on my vehicle well what happens when I drive in different states? who gets that tax money? Most important question... if they do this will they take off the road tax on fuel?