The state of Oregon is experimenting with the idea of basing highway taxes on how many miles you drive, instead of how much gas you buy. To do this would require an elaborate system, including GPS trackers in every car. Why would they go to all this trouble?
From UPI:
Eighty percent of Oregon’s highway money comes from its 24-cents-per-gallon gas tax. If the state promotes reducing gasoline consumption and consumers tend to buy the fuel-efficient vehicles, including hybrids, highway revenues would take a hit, The New York Times reported.
Oregonians (especially from the western part of the state) tend to think of Californians as knuckle-dragging conservatives. So here’s this very, very liberal state with a gasoline tax that was specifically promoted as a way to get people into environmentally friendly cars. The bureaucracy there — operating as bureaucracies do everywhere — got very used to the huge revenue windfall that the new, larger tax raised. And now, when the tax is looking like it had its intended effect, are they happy about it? Mais non, of course! With typical bureaucratic malign myopia, they see the reduced gasoline usage as a threat, and on cue the roll out the standard bureaucratic response: scare tactics. Take away our money (you can be certain that’s how they think of it), and your roads will fall apart. You won’t hear a bit of discussion about how they used to get along just fine with much less money…
Lets look at this from a completely different perspective: good governance policy. Where should the funding for highways come from? Highways are used for so many different things — like any true utility service — that this one is hard to get a handle on. Certainly big chunks of users include commuters and shipping, but there are lots of other categories of users as well: emergency services, military, shopping, and on and on. And what are the costs of having a highway system? Certainly a big chunk of that is the original construction cost, but there is also a very high recurring cost — maintenance, related law enforcement and emergency services, and so on. And there are indirect beneficiaries — the businesses whose employees can now live further away, the cities who can now attract residents and businesses, increased visitors to a region, and so on.
My own inclination is that highways should be built and maintained out of state and federal governments general funds. Both gasoline taxes and mileage taxes are terribly anti-progressive — they hit the lower income folks far harder than they hit upper income folks. Here in San Diego County, where I live, there’s a great example of this: our county’s concentrations of businesses tend to be close to high-priced housing areas: downtown, Del Mar, Rancho Bernardo, etc. Many of the employees of these businesses have long commutes to “bedroom communities” with much lower cost housing. In fact, this accounts for much of San Diego’s notorious rush hour snarling. Those employees who drive long distances have (on average) substantially lower incomes than those employees who live close by. This was true for every company I’ve worked for in San Diego for the past 25 years. Consider how a mileage or gasoline tax works for those people — it’s upside-down, with lower income people paying more, both in absolute and in relative terms. For something that’s a pure utility, with such broad benefits, I think that’s wrong. Hence my belief that highways should be funded from general funds…and that gasoline and mileage taxes are morally wrong.
