As more drivers turn to zero-emissions vehicles, which don't have to pay anything at the pump, California's gas tax could soon be a thing of the past. But it would be replaced by something else.
The electric tax doesn’t go towards fixing roads, though. That’s why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn’t have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I’m not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
OBD-II device that reads your odometer and sends that in to be tracked. It has an OPTIONAL GPS which, if turned on, will make sure to only tax the miles driven in California (so it would not apply to miles while out of state). If turned off then all miles are taxed.
Car Telemetry that’s already in newer cars that can phone home and send the numbers in (This is my lease favorite)
You simply take a picture of your odometer and submit it. No invasion of privacy and seeing where you’re going. This is the one I like the best.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then – when you’re already standing there with your checkbook anyway – and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people’s potato pictures of their dashboards.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Are you saying that problems could be fixed simply by better allocating existing taxes? That’s what it sounds like. Tax revenue collected from gasoline sales is bound to drop as less and less ICE vehicles are used. Something will have to compensate for that drop.
Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.
Anyway, I was following on to the above poster’s observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I’m aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.
California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they’re also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it’s not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it’s dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.
One thing’s for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they’re going to get on it.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
The problem is that that’s not linked to usage, which you want — you want consumption of a resource to be connected to paying for it. Otherwise, you get overuse of the resource; it’d create an artificial incentive to go out and drive more, because you’re being subsidized by income tax payers or whatever.
The second paragraph I wrote, which everyone conveniently ignored with deliberate and apparently laser-guided precision, addresses exactly that.
I’ll spell it out even more clearly since apparently nobody got it: The state already knows how much you drive your vehicle because they record your mileage every time you renew your tags. They just proceed to do fuck-all useful with that information. If somebody wanted to replace a fuel tax with a usage tax, that would be the blindingly obvious place to do it. Easily, effortlessly, and without the need for any gimcrack tracking arrangements, bolt-on hardware, privacy violations, snooping, or fuss.
But of course, the tracking and the snooping is, if not the actual point, at least a highly desirable bonus from the state’s perspective.
The electric tax doesn’t go towards fixing roads, though. That’s why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn’t have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I’m not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
OBD-II device that reads your odometer and sends that in to be tracked. It has an OPTIONAL GPS which, if turned on, will make sure to only tax the miles driven in California (so it would not apply to miles while out of state). If turned off then all miles are taxed.
Car Telemetry that’s already in newer cars that can phone home and send the numbers in (This is my lease favorite)
You simply take a picture of your odometer and submit it. No invasion of privacy and seeing where you’re going. This is the one I like the best.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then – when you’re already standing there with your checkbook anyway – and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people’s potato pictures of their dashboards.
Are you saying that problems could be fixed simply by better allocating existing taxes? That’s what it sounds like. Tax revenue collected from gasoline sales is bound to drop as less and less ICE vehicles are used. Something will have to compensate for that drop.
Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.
Anyway, I was following on to the above poster’s observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I’m aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.
California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they’re also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it’s not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it’s dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.
One thing’s for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they’re going to get on it.
The problem is that that’s not linked to usage, which you want — you want consumption of a resource to be connected to paying for it. Otherwise, you get overuse of the resource; it’d create an artificial incentive to go out and drive more, because you’re being subsidized by income tax payers or whatever.
The second paragraph I wrote, which everyone conveniently ignored with deliberate and apparently laser-guided precision, addresses exactly that.
I’ll spell it out even more clearly since apparently nobody got it: The state already knows how much you drive your vehicle because they record your mileage every time you renew your tags. They just proceed to do fuck-all useful with that information. If somebody wanted to replace a fuel tax with a usage tax, that would be the blindingly obvious place to do it. Easily, effortlessly, and without the need for any gimcrack tracking arrangements, bolt-on hardware, privacy violations, snooping, or fuss.
But of course, the tracking and the snooping is, if not the actual point, at least a highly desirable bonus from the state’s perspective.