As Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire rolls back her promise to deal with climate change in the wake of budget problems, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulingowski is proposing to pay for transportation with a tax on auto mileage rather than a gas tax.
Taxing mileage is controversial because it requires tracking devices (privacy advocates worry they’d allow the government to track citizens’ every move) and because drivers pay the same amount whether their vehicle is fuel-efficient or a gas-guzzler. On the other hand, that problem could be solved easily enough—through a tax credit on fuel-efficient cars, for example. Moreover, taxing by the mile has the potential to make drivers more conscientious about how and when they’re driving, encouraging them to eliminate or combine trips to save miles. And it solves the problem of wildly fluctuating gas prices, which produce unpredictable revenues.
It’s exactly the kind of innovative idea Gov. Gregoire should at least consider—if only she hadn’t pandered to Republicans by promising to solve the state’s revenue crisis without touching taxes.
Can’t the State Legislature propose new taxes while they are reviewing and adopting the state budget?
Why are directing your criticism at one branch of the state government?
How in the hell is jacking up taxes during a major economic recession a good idea? You keep complaining, but you never address that point.
She also is breaking contracts agreed to wtih SEIU and another union.
Keeping promises to GOP ideals; breaking promises to labor.
“Change you can believe in”?
Gimmie a break, what the hell can Queen Christine do about “climate change”???? CLIMATE CHANGE is happening because the SUN is getting hotter!!! Temperatures are rising on the Moon and on Mars!!! What does Queen Christine plan to do about temperatures rising on Mars?
What are the advantages of taxing mileage over gas usage? Doesn’t taxing gas useage punish both heavy drivers and gas guzzlers over light drivers and fuel sipper, as well as being easier to implement?
What do we do with people who want lots of services without having to pay more taxes, besides beat them about the head and shoulders with sticks?
So they have to buy three million gizmos first? Gizmos which couldn’t possibly break or need upgrading or servicing ever, right?
Taxing gas by the gallon has all of the benefits you mention, and none of the drawbacks. Revenues are no more unpredictable than with the mileage tax, because you don’t tax a percentage of the price, you tax the number of gallons, which fluctuate exactly the same under both schemes. Both schemes make drivers more conscientious, but taxing gas even more so.
A tax credit system to counteract the problem of overtaxing the very behavior you want to encourage — more fuel-efficient vehicles — is stupid and bureaucratic and a form of make-work, and just plays into the hands of Republicans who think you just like to futz with the tax code for the fun of it. You’ve now instituted two systems to achieve a net goal of zero. Brilliant!
Why not just tax gas once and be done with it? It will achieve BOTH goals: reduce miles, and increase fuel-efficiency.
@7 is the correct answer.
@5 was fine but @7 nailed it.
(You can through in a few toll roads if you like.)
Ok, so when are they running light rail to Antelope or Madras?
Otherwise, it’s taxation on poor people who get no service for rich city slickers who don’t deserve service.
The Rotten Boroughs have been replaced with the Rotten Urbs. Rich aristocrats hijacking the public treasury to enrich themselves.
Erica – “easily enough?”
I’m all for paying taxes, a proper lefty and all that – this “innovative idea” is incredibly complicated.
Instead of simply increasing the existing gas tax, which encourages conservation, you want to track every Washington driver electronically and charge by mile. Of course, this then punishes efficient cars, so we now have to have an additional tax-form schedule to account for THAT problem. Oh, and which tax are we talking about here, the WA sales tax? No? Are you perhaps “simply” “considering” having a WA income tax? What about non-WA-licensed drivers? How do we charge them? Do you have a simple suggestion for that?
Yeah. Having my car tracked constantly by the government so I can spend more time on my taxes is obviously the way to go here. So much simpler than increasing the gas tax.
is there any way to install some sort of nanodevice in people’s cerebral cortexes to register when they are having non-carbon neutral thoughts in order to tax those?
Why not a tax on mileage per GVW?
So that larger vehicles pay more, since they cause more road damage?
And exempt high MPG vehicles from the tax to encourage their usage – for trucks/cars that get 30 to 50 mpg a 25 percent reduction, for those that get 50 to 75 mpg a 50 percent reduction, and for those that get 75 to 100 mpg a 75 percent reduction?
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archi…
Your government in action!
oh, and Fnarf @7 – you know why they don’t do it, it’s because such “gas” taxes have to be then spent on roads.
Look at it this way: what’s easier, collecting tax from a few thousand points (pumps) or a few million (cars)?
News: Blago will appoint a fomrer state comptroller, black guy, to Obama’s senate seat. Savvy; vividly illustrates Blago’s argument that that stuff on the tapes was “just talk”; and creates a huge diversion as the presumably totally innocent appointee fights like hell against the US Senate to make them seat him.
Who wants to vote against a black guy for this seat? The Senate is still pretty white.
Link registration cost to gross vehicle weight. Problem solved. Oh and while your at it, stop exempting commercial trucks from emissions.
@14, as always you are full of shit. This would be a new tax, not the old gas tax, and could be spent any way the law says. It is, in fact, a carbon tax.
Erica, the new depression era budget maven
Worried that cars and roads vaporize at all cost
With NO money there will be less driving – with NO money there will be less road construction or repair
What is there about Depression Reality that is so hard to understand?
And this is year one … wait for year three when the State declares bankruptcy – as this and many others might be forced to do …
Does Erica understand why gas is now much cheaper than a year ago? Under stress of recession and looming de4pression, world wide consumption of petrol is falling, now there is adequate supply … but less money to buy, thus, less consumption
Installing millage trackers and then giving fuel economy credits is a nothing Rube Goldberg gas tax.
I can understand how Oregon’s rural idiots would fall for this but I actually thought ECB was smarter. Do you know what really makes drivers more conscious of how much they drive, and combining trips, carpooling and so on? Higher pump prices.
Higher prices at the pump don’t just encourage less driving and better fuel economy, but also lighter weight cars and trucks, which decreases wear on roads and bridges. Win, win, win.
Also, a simple gas tax is slightly less regressive if you consider that the cost of the tracking devices is going to be a flat fee per vehicle, much more easily borne by the rich than the poor.
A much more innovative and effective move would be to sell car insurance by the gallon, at the gas pump. Everyone would get coverage whether they want it or not, and it would give everyone an even greater incentive to park their car. Any second now Will in His Dreams is going to say they have government car insurance in Canada, which is halfway there. And it proves it can be done.
Finally, it bears repeating that this is still regressive, and we’re already in a terribly regressive tax situation here. Building a real rapid transit system that everyone can use is one way to address that, and save the planet too. And have fewer wars for oil.
In short: Mileage Tax? Laughable.
@2, hernandez, you gotta let go of the idea that increasing taxes is bad during a recession. Some things need to be done if the state is to be kept solvent.
@20, you read and respond to Slog on a near-daily basis. Whatever led you to believe that ECB was “smart”?
Kulongoski. No W. Just sayin’.
I like that pretty much all the commenters here get the point that this is either less effective as a tax (i.e., has many unintended perverse incentives) or equivalent to a gas tax, while being harder and more expensive to implement and harder to collect.
What I’m confused by is why Erica doesn’t get this. It seems that the smart-to-stupid ratio on this page is about 20:1, yet the one stupid person is the one who’s blogging. What gives?
@18;@14:
Because of the wording of the 18th Amendment to the State Constitution, it’s pretty likely that anything referred to as a a gas tax would be restricted to “highway purposes.” However, I think there’s a good argument to be made that a carbon tax on gasoline (say 25cents on top of the existing gas 37.5 cent gas tax) would not be restricted to spending on roads, though I’m sure BIAW or some other conservative interest would litigate the issue. There’s no doubt that Erica’s idea, or a weight fee would be unrestricted and could be invested in transit.
dbferris, Fnarf, and elenchos FTW. Mileage tax is totally and utterly unworkable.
@26, this is why, for as idealistic as some liberals are, many should be kept as far away from the government as possible. The idea of spending 2 dollars to get one in return is unsustainable and ruinous.
“On the other hand, that problem could be solved easily enough—through a tax credit on fuel-efficient cars, for example.”
Erica, if you read the article you linked to, you would see that the whole motive for this tax is to make up for lost tax revenue due to “Oregonians…demand[ing] more fuel-efficient vehicles.” In other words, the goal is to make people who buy Priuses pay as much as they would pay if they drove a Hummer, or else we won’t be able to fund transit.
And when everyone rides transit (which, I believe, is your final goal), what are we going to tax to fund transit? I’m a big supporter of public transit. Unfortunately, in order for public transit to be sustainable in the long term, it has to have a revenue source other than a tax on the activity it intends to replace (driving). Otherwise, the more popular and attractive your mass transit infrastructure, the less funding it gets.
I supposed next ECB will want a congestion charge?
Nanny State, thy name is Erica…..
Wait, what? What the FUCK is wrong with the gas tax? You want to try to track miles driven by every vehicle in your state (I assume driving though Oregon I pick up my meter at the borde?), police that, and then create god knows how much waste by trying to give credits to people who have fuel-efficient cars? That is the absolutely most IDIOTIC proposal I have ever heard.
Especially — ESPECIALLY — considering a gas tax already DOES THIS. You drive more miles, you buy more gas, you pay more taxes! You buy a fuel-efficient car, you automagicly get your “tax credit” by not buying as much gas. WHY THE FUCK do you want to make it more complicated?
Does the Stranger actually pay ECB? If they do, it seems like they pay her to come up with the stupidest, most nonsensical, contradictory posts possible.
A per-gallon (not per-dollar) gas tax is so obviously a more sensible solution than some sort of GPS mileage tracker thingy that I spent few minutes trying to come up with a reason you would EVER want to do the latter. Here’s one reason, and it’s not so crazy — if you’ve bought into the idea of, say, bridge or highway tolls that varying according to time of day, it’s a small step (some would say a slippery step) to having differential pricing for different stretches of road, and varying times of day. If you want to drive down a crowded city street at rush hour, ok, but it would cost more than driving down a lonesome stretch of highway, at 3 a.m. All-in-all, I’d go with the gas tax as much simpler to implement, and having the right incentive the drive the smallest car you need for your purposes, but the differential pricing scheme has a couple advantages: you could use it to partly address the argument that a gas tax penalizes rural people more than city dwellers, and you could use it to help push traffic out of points in time and space where you’d like to have a more bike- or pedestrian-friendly space. You’d need to figure out a way to neutralize the creepy Big Brother vibe associated with having a governmemt agency track your car everywhere it goes….
As @25 points out, gas taxes have to be spent on highways, roads, streets, car ferries, the highway patrol, or signs and signals, under the 18th Amendment to the State Constitution (Article II, Section 40). But so, in all likelihood, would “carbon surcharges” on gasoline or diesel fuel and mileage taxes. Aside from that, what Fnarf @7 (but not @18) said.
@18 – once again, you fail to get the point, Fnarf.
Yes, if you called it a carbon tax, it would be legal.
But not as a gas tax.
That’s why we have a retail sales tax on gasoline instead of a gas tax.
Now, go jump off the Fremont Bridge in your undies.
Who cares how many miles I drive? No one.
Who cares how much gas I use? Everyone.
Worst idea ever.
(dang, kk beat me to it and was much more on point and incisive than any of us have been)
Will, if you could read, you would notice that my comment @18 contains, indeed ends with, the words “carbon tax”.
add to this, when England had a similar proposal, Top Gear brought up that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch from there to track speeds and penalize drivers for each traffic infraction.
About.com of all places has a pretty succinct argument against the Oregon proposal, including what @28 said – it would limit the growth in sales of fuel efficient vehicles.
http://economics.about.com/od/taxesandec…
I find it odd that some “progressives” don’t mind it in slightest to have the govt. monitor their automobiles, but scream bloody murder about their rights are being violated if the govt. intercepts incoming calls from known terrorists into this country.
Top Gear is spectacularly wrong on all points related to cars and public policy. Funny show, though.
Not as good as Ramsey’s Kitchen or Couples, though.
Could someone please check the archives of The Onion — because loony proposals like these tend to pop up there as satire about 2-3 years before they show up in the real news section.