A Mileage Tax? Cue the Outrage
Carl DeMaio has found another grift. Actually it’s a two-fer, meaning twice as many appeals for donations, and (he hopes) twice as many new names on his mailing lists.
Things have been slow at his Reform California organization since the success of the Recall Newsom campaign... Oh, wait! That failed by a Yuge margin. Among his other "victories:"
His election integrity campaign (Arizona-style ‘audits’, gut vote-by-mail, and keep ‘illegals’ out of polling places) hasn’t exactly caught on since candidates like Larry Elder haven’t come up with evidence proving Democrats’ dirty deeds kept them from winning.
The crusade to eliminate CRT in our schools in a state rings hollow in a state where the white people who are afraid of being replaced are just over one-third of the population, and too many people couldn’t say what the initials stood for or exactly what classes it was being taught in.
An effort to recall Chardá Bell-Fontenot from her position as the Area 3 representative on the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District Board of Education failed, as backers of the effort didn’t even bother to submit signatures by the September 21st deadline.
Saving Proposition 13 has become a worn out cliche, comparable to the fable of the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.
https://twitter.com/lucasoconnor/status/1453886661742395401?s=20
Reports about the possibility of a (State + local) mileage tax to pay infrastructure costs related to mitigating climate change, along with a coalition of labor and environmentalists sponsoring a local sales tax boost which would also complete existing projects have provided DeMaio and his fellow crusaders with a ray of hope.
Mind you, nobody’s figured out how to levy such a mileage tax. The possibility of such an effort is just being put up for public discussion, and no legalese has been crafted that would enable a road tax.
That’s okay. In fact, the vaguer the idea is the better. In an era where facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals, any reasoning hewing toward science and the future gets in the way of a fear based effort.
Local message boards and comments on news posts are already chock full of outraged citizens decrying a mileage tax, providing easy pickins for DeMaio’s crew.
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Demaio-ites are invited to stick their fingers in their ears and sing la-la-la-la-la-la for this next part of the story, since it covers some inconvenient facts.
In the coming years electric and hybrid cars are expected to be the main vehicles on the road, and fuel efficiency is already cutting into gas tax revenues by around 75 miles a tank per vehicle in the last few years.
Road and infrastructure costs, historically paid for with gas taxes, will eventually go unfunded. Having a car-centric transportation system makes eliminating greenhouse gases impossible.
Electric and hybrid cars should have to pay their fair share for road usage and repair. Get your pencils out, it’s time to do some math.
The average driver, according to the State Department of transportation covers 13,500 miles annually. At 30 miles to the gallon, that works out to 450 gallons of gas. Taxed at the current rate of 51 cents a gallon, state and local governments collect roughly $230 on that sort of mileage.
Charging 4 cents per mile (state+local) would equal $540 a year. Outrageous, right? Except that the cost of electricity, maintenance, etc isn’t factored in
Via Money.com:
Electric car owners spent around $0.03 per mile to get their car moving, which is $0.04 less than small sedan owners and $0.05 less than people with small SUVs.
Your personal savings would vary based partly on how much gas and electricity cost where you live. According to a U.S. Department of Energy study, the savings for going electric in Washington state are particularly significant. Over the course of 15 years of car ownership, the electricity needed to run a battery-powered EV could cost upwards of $14,480 less than what you'd pay for gas in a similar vehicle.
EV owners also save on maintenance costs because they don’t have to worry about oil changes or new air filters. That amounts to savings of about $330 each year.
In the short run, the fly in the ointment is the upfront cost of EVs. In the long run, prices are coming down at about 10% annually.
Among the provisions making it into the President’s proposed $1.85 trillion spending plan (remember that number!) is a proposal allowing automakers to offer a $4,500 tax credit, on top of other credits, to buyers of electric vehicles that are made in the U.S. with union labor.
And then there are the gnarly costs of fixing your stuff when Mother Nature expresses her anger about human-induced climate change.
According to the federal government, 2020 was a record year for extreme weather events:
There were 22 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States, shattering the previous annual record of 16 events, which occurred in 2017 and 2011. The billion-dollar events of 2020 included a record 7 disasters linked to tropical cyclones, 13 to severe storms, 1 to drought, and 1 to wildfires. The 22 events cost the nation a combined $95 billion in damages.
Adding the 2020 events to the record that began in 1980, the U.S. has sustained 285 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. (All cost estimates are adjusted based on the Consumer Price Index as of December 2020). The cumulative cost for these 285 events exceeds $1.875 trillion.
Keep in mind that the above estimates do not reflect the total cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters, only those associated with events in excess of $1 billion in damages.
(I’m sure the similarity between the cumulative costs and the bottom line in Biden’s infrastructure proposal is just a coincidence.)
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Staffers with the The San Diego Association of Governments think a mileage tax could substantially fund a 30-year, $160 billion regional plan to include free public transportation and a 200 mile regional rail network costing upwards of $43 billion.
The other part of this funding package is being organized by environmental and labor groups, via a ballot measure on the November 2022 ballot raising sales taxes by a half-cent. Having a non-governmental entity behind the proposal means it will have to meet a lower threshold for approval (50%+1) than a government-backed measure (67%).
Media accounts about the groups’ planning indicate the pitch for voters will focus on the percentage of the money going to highway improvements in an attempt to sidestep the polarizing highway-versus-transit differences within SANDAG.
Supporters say they are filing paperwork with the county Registrar of Voters soon, and hope to start gathering signatures next month. A website with more information about the campaign is at letsgosd.org.
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It’s important to remember Carl DeMaio’s libertarian vision of paradise would include a different kind of mileage tax, namely the tolls being collected for highway use after they’ve been sold off to private enterprise.
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