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Automotive News & Views Is a Higher Gasoline Tax Good Or Bad For America?
849 messages, Last post on Nov 19, 2009 at 2:22 PM
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Replying to: hpmctorque (Jan 29, 2009 2:45 pm) This is one case where I agree. If they want to rebuild the economy and create jobs start building Nuclear power plants. With a half life of what? 360,000 years? Fuel would last longer and we would have the added advantage of a larger electrical grid. I believe in truth automotive fuel is less than 50 percent of our energy useage in this country. So if we change our industrial energy useage to nuclear we would save a lot more than we ever would gain from a fuel tax. |
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I think that a faster means to get people to change their behavior and buy more efficient vehicles would be to tax inefficient vehicles at the time of sale and/or resale, and use this revenue to credit or subsidize more efficient cars. You tack on a $1000 guzzler tax on a vehicle getting 15 mpg, and give a $1000 credit or rebate of some sort on a car getting 30+. The actual numbers could be altered, I'm just using them for example. Very few people NEED a 15 mpg vehicle--yeah a FEW do. Maybe instead of a lump sum, you make some sort of added fee, like a property tax, that you pay yearly if you drive an inefficient vehicle. I think people buy relatively small quantities of gas at a time, so a gas tax would meet with relatively little success in changing behavior. I mean, so you pay 10 cents a gallon more, or something like that. Yeah, it sucks, but you drive on. Now, when you get socked for $500 when you buy a car, you pay a lot more attention. You get a $1000 tax credit, you pay more attention. Yes, there are flaws with this approach. Yes, the wealthy are going to own whatever inefficient car they want regardless of the tax. Percentage-wise, I think the wealthy own a relatively small proportion of the total number of inefficient vehicles on the road. You could even levy the tax on inefficient used vehicles when they are re-sold, and credit sales of efficient used vehicles. I don't know, maybe you incentivize people to live close to work with a deduction if they work within "x" miles of their home...give people a financial incentive to seek housing near work when possible... Efficiency is like anything, really. You have to give people a logical reason to alter their behavior, and the reason needs to be immediately apparent and significant. If I have to pay $10,000 for solar cells on my roof, but can buy a gas water heater for $500, I'm going to go with the gas water heater no matter how neat I think it would be to have solar power. You give people some incentive to go solar, you get their interest. Maybe I get a $500 tax credit per year for 10 years, maybe I pay a $100 charge on my taxes every year because my furnace is old and inefficient. The carrot and stick can be used to make it make sense for people to change. In the end, my rationale is that taxing gas hits people spread over time too easy to ignore or deal with the pain. You need to make the pain more immediate and noticeable to get people to change. 10 or 20 or 30 cents a gallon even, eh, most people will gripe but keep doing what they always do.
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Replying to: bricknord (Jan 29, 2009 10:07 pm) The problem with that strategy is it completely ignores actual use. The person living in Santa Maria and driving to Santa Barbara for work (~50 miles) each way every day driving a Prius isn't going to use any less gas than someone with a 5 mile commute within Santa Barbara in an Expedition (the person in SB will pay 3x the rent, but that is neither here nor there)..
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Replying to: lilengineerboy (Jan 30, 2009 5:11 am) But no matter the specifics of where you draw the line, I see the idea of taxes-and-credits as being mettlesome and needlessly complicated. In summary here's my position: 1) the gas tax should cover road and bridge maintenance fully. 2) the gas tax needs to increase as costs increase for roads and bridges 3) the federal gas tax should not increase for grandiose projects benefiting a limited area. Anyone from New England knows of the $15B spent for a few miles of tunnel and bridges, of a project the was origianlly supposed to be $2B. After $2B was spent, the feds should have said "Mass. you can pay for this with your local taxes". 4) the gas tax should NOT be used for Green purposes. While everyone may want everyone to be efficient, I feel that is fine. But I do not want the government determining how efficient I should be and in what ways (that in itself is inefficient - a waste of government resources). The government should educate, not penalize or determine how much energy anyone can use and how. 5) if someone wants to tell me to use less oil/gasoline, I want a replacement energy. Start building nuclear plants, clean coal electrical plants, wind mills and solar, and make decent electric cars available. BTW: if we as a society do want to decrease oil/gasoline usage, before coming to the motorist I can name a bunch of things that use oil/gasoline that are less beneficial to society. For example I would first look at eliminating recreational activities that use such (millions of power/recreational boats, snowmobiles, ATV's) and then limit recreational driving (your state tourism bureau sure wouldn't like me, and I also have a problem with states wasting money on tourism ads, while they can't afford to feed and care for the poor!).
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Replying to: kernick (Jan 30, 2009 6:51 am) As long as the government has to go to war all over the Middle East just to keep the oil flowing, it is an ENORMOUS vested interest of the government's to get people using less oil overall. I'm just saying... As for the gas tax, we would need an almost $0.20/gallon increase TOMORROW just to restore it to the level it was in 1993, after inflation. I say make it $0.30 tomorrow instead, and then increase it a dime a year after that. 
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people have weighed in on this subject in the last week or two as well: Automakers Join Call for Higher Federal Gas Tax If you don’t think the automotive world is shifting beneath our feet, think again. USA Today reports on a growing trend: car makers and dealers pushing for higher fuel taxes, of all things. The auto industry’s newfound love of eco-friendly policy comes down its need to satisfy increasingly stringent federal fuel economy regulations. If gas prices stay low, the government-pleasing vehicles will continue to languish on the lots and docks, Prius-like. Small car profit margins will disappear, Prius-like. AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson was ahead of this particular curve ball when he called high gas prices a good thing. MJ is now joining the New York Times editorial board (amongst others) calling for increased federal taxes to git ‘er done. (After all, European motorists pay their governments through their nasal passages for the privilege of fueling their vehicles.) One of Uncle Sam’s new BFFs agrees. “GM CEO Rick Wagoner said taxing gas or providing rebates on fuel-efficient cars ‘is going to be the most effective way to move the needle fast.’” While Jackson and Wagoner are of one mind on raising gas taxes (or something), the AutoNation jefe is no fan of all this wild needle swinging stuff. “We watched the consumer stampede to fuel efficiency in May, and now the herd is getting ready to stampede back to their old ways,” says Jackson. http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/automakers-join-call-for-higher-federal-gas-tax- - / Price shocks like the one last year are much worse for the economy as a whole than a slow but steady increase in the price of gas over time via taxation. The latter is predictable and stable, the former isn't. Here:s one example of that: Price swings are used-auto 'nightmare' Dealers say volatile fuel costs make planning tough Used-vehicle prices have fluctuated so much recently that dealers say they are having trouble choosing which used cars and trucks to buy and how to price them at retail. The chief culprit, dealers say, is the price of gasoline, which has swung from about $3 a gallon a year ago to more than $4 last summer to less than $2. As gasoline prices drop, dealers say, used-vehicle customers are more interested in trucks and less drawn to fuel-efficient cars. When fuel prices spiked last year, they say, the preferences were reversed. Those changes affect used-vehicle sales and prices. Compounding the problem, dealers add, are the decreased availability and higher cost of floorplan loans, which make decisions about used-vehicle inventory even more critical. "I've never seen anything like this," says Dave Conant, who owns eight dealerships in Southern California. "The volatility has been really hard to get your arms around. It affects the opportunity for dealers to make any kind of business decision." Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation Inc., the nation's largest dealership group, says drastic changes in fuel prices have made used-vehicle inventory management at his company's 278 stores a "nightmare." "We've been on a roller coaster," Jackson told Automotive News. "Last March I couldn't give away a used Prius. In June I was paying $4,000 over book to get a Prius. Today I can't give away a Prius." http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090126/ANA06/901260361/1132- /ANA09&template=printart
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Replying to: nippononly (Jan 30, 2009 7:22 am) Surely you jest? I count 1 war we were involved in - Iraq. Was the oil flowing before and immediately up to the beginning of the war in 2002? Yes. So we never went into Iraq to GET the oil flowing. We went into Iraq mainly so that a man like Saddam would not have the oil revenues to rebuild his military. As for the gas tax, we would need an almost $0.20/gallon increase TOMORROW just to restore it to the level it was in 1993, after inflation. That's fine. As long as it is used for roads and bridges only; and not schools and subways.
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Replying to: nippononly (Jan 30, 2009 7:25 am)  This is the guy who's brought one of the largest corporations in the world to beggar-status!
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Replying to: kernick (Jan 30, 2009 10:09 am) As for Rick Wagoner, say what you will about him, but he was far from the only one quoted in that article, and if you read the original article it was sourced from, there were even more saying it's high time, even PAST time to do this.....
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Believe me, we have been in ZERO "Wars For Oil" because if we had, gas would be twenty cents a gallon and we'd all be driving Escalades, Navigators, and Hummers.
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