Lets Screw those West Virginia miners......instead....
- Thread starter bornaneer
- Start date
One of the funny things about liberals, they make laws that say you have to get better gas mileage. they give you tax incentives to buy hybrids and then when tax revenues go down from conservation, they then levy a road tax on hybrids or raise taxes on each gallon of gas sold. Brilliant.
How do you suggest making up the road construction funding shortfall that results from decreased gas tax revenue due to fuel efficiency?
So the cost of energy doesn't go down when market forces demand that it does? Let the public pick what they want. If they want to save money by buying smaller cars, so be it, if they want bigger cars, more gas consumption, more power to them. When govt picks winners and losers, freedom loses. Govt should stay out of it.
I'm shocked,you are for having 40 lane highways instead of 20 lanes in places like California. I see you logic, let punish West Virginia miner families instead of the California pollution spewers. Yes, yes ...... many more voters. I guess you are also in the dark about taxing miles instead of gallons of gas. And I thought you were progressive.
I know the mileage tax was one proposed solution, but that has a lot of logistic issues - namely how do you enforce that? Of the 3 cars in our family, none have built-in GPS or are networked at all. So you have to rely on some sort of reporting, owner or otherwise, to get accurate mileage information. In Colorado, cars aren't inspected annually, so that isn't an option here.
One option is to increase the gas tax - really unpopular, so unlikely to happen. You could increase property taxes at the state levels to raise funds there, and I guess you could institute some sort of luxury tax on car purchases at the federal level. I doubt either happens across the board though.
Easiest thing would be to require annual inspections statewide (should happen anyway) and use the mileage at the time of inspection. They'll have to carve out exceptions for certain things, but at least it's a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009
Not sure I understand your question. Our gov't has been trying to improve fleet mileage for decades and I'm not sure what plans the various administrations have made and yeah, I guess that's funny. It's likely that some of the ARRA money went for highway construction but that money is long gone and of course is no long term fix as a source of highway funds.
Do I think annual inspections are a good idea? Sure. I'm not upset I don't have to pay for them anymore - or the jacked up price on the license plate light bulb that I didn't notice was burned out. I think DC used to make you do inspections every 6 months, but they were always looking for revenue sources.
Right, but the argument made is that they are using the roads more than Joe blow, so why shouldn't they be taxed more? Trucking would grind to a halt or cause massive inflation unless they received some kind of shipping credit or reduced rates. They however do more to damage the roads than a normal car so why should we sustain their increased use? What about Gov vehicles? All kinds of problems to this plan.
Actually, the true Progressive does not find it necessary to delete one form of taxation to be REPLACED by another. They would prefer to have an additional source ADDED to the existing source.
More revenue is needed, it is never necessary to cut expenditures. Now, that is Progressive.
The problem is that more revenue IS needed. The highways fund is almost down to zero, our infrastructure is in bad shape and declining. So we have to move money around, borrow more money, or find new revenue sources. I don't like the mileage tax for a ton of reasons, most listed somewhere in this thread. I don't have a problem with an increase to the gas tax, a tax that has been the same since 1993. It won't happen though. People want good roads for free, same as people want everything und r r the sun for free.
States could look at increase vehicle registration costs. From a federal standpoint an increase in the fuel tax is really the only option. No way in hell we want the feds to have GPS trackers installed into every vehicle.
NEWSFLASH!! If you have GPS in your car or carry a cell phone, they already have your MetaData.
The highway fund had excessive money in it several years back. There was even a suggestion that 3 cents be cut from fed tax on fuel. A leading Dem Senator (Tom?) at the time asked, "Why would we give it back to them after we have it?".
Sure would have been nice to use some of that wild Obama spending money in 2009 &10 on infrastructure. As I recall, a substantial part of that was originally earmarked for infrastructure only to be reallocated to pay back some Obama supporters. Damn. just think what could have been constructed for several hundred billion and may have even created a job of two.
That would/will be a real kick in the ***, don't you think? Government Motors Corp was giving cars at about 40% of cost to make them more fuel efficient. Battery operation was the way to go. Get rid of the gas-guzzlers. Any kind of synthetic fuel was the future. Who in hell was the brilliant person in DC who came up with this ultimatum without any consideration at all for the unintended consequences? If vehicles get double the mileage per gallon and roads are maintained by tax on a gallon, which brilliant bastard could not foresee that source of revenue to be cut by approximately one half, all things being equal?
How many vehicles have you rid yourself of that the mileage was not indicated on the paper?
Exactly what I said. Unintended consequences. Here's a good one, under Obamacare, they were depending on young healthy people to sign up to help pay for us old people. They then built into it that you could insure your children to age 26. How are the young, on their parents ins at a reduced rate, going to pay for the old? Anybody who thinks DC can solve anything, is full of crap. Getting back to hybrids, what's going to happen to the batteries when they have to be replaced? That's a major problem now. DC stands for Dumb Crap.
With regard to your insurance question, money in the pool for people who don't require much medical coverage is the padding that the insurance companies need. If you are paying for a family plan, you are paying more than an individual, i.e. more money to the insurance companies.
Not exactly sure what the point is you're making. After Obama leaves, this crap starts kicking in for the next President to deal with. Insurance companies are going to rasie rates to make up for the differences in premiums and the payouts. It will be a mess that the next admin has to deal with. Hopefully, the new president will have the clout to get rid of it in most of it's forms.
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Maybe Obama can fix the auto insurance industry like he did for health insurance. Do you realize how many poor folks are not insured. Just think of all those potential VOTES.
Only 41 million uninsured. Gee, that is about the same number we had to prompt us to pass Obamacare. How did that fail? I thought everyone was supposed to be covered with passage of the bill.
Only 41 million uninsured. Gee, that is about the same number we had to prompt us to pass Obamacare. How did that fail? I thought everyone was supposed to be covered with passage of the bill.