Roughly half of the money that gets spent on US roads comes from sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, etc., and none of that bears any relation to how much driving you (we) do.
I’m really trying to figure out how that makes it OK to tax an EV for double per mile as compared to a prius. The only point I see you making is that roads are fucking expensive to maintain and they drain taxes from everywhere.
Correct, but people do get value from a public road system existing. For example, I “use” roads when stuff gets delivered to me, or when a fire truck shows up to put out a fire at my neighbor’s house. My point is that when we do tax people for driving we’re carefully metering it for one group of people and charging another group a flat all-you-can-drive amount, which unfairly taxes people who don’t drive very much.
Roughly half of the money that gets spent on US roads comes from sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, etc., and none of that bears any relation to how much driving you (we) do.
I’m really trying to figure out how that makes it OK to tax an EV for double per mile as compared to a prius. The only point I see you making is that roads are fucking expensive to maintain and they drain taxes from everywhere.
I wasn’t trying to say “Therefore it’s all OK,” so much as “none of this makes any sense, none of this has ever been fair.”
Even non-drivers wind up paying taxes for roads.
Correct, but people do get value from a public road system existing. For example, I “use” roads when stuff gets delivered to me, or when a fire truck shows up to put out a fire at my neighbor’s house. My point is that when we do tax people for driving we’re carefully metering it for one group of people and charging another group a flat all-you-can-drive amount, which unfairly taxes people who don’t drive very much.