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To fix the potholes and crumbling roads, federal, state and local governments rely on fuel taxes, which raise more than US$80 billion a year and pay for around three-quarters of what the U.S. spends on building new roads and maintaining them.
I recently purchased an electric car, the Tesla Model 3. While swerving down a particularly rutted highway in New York, the economist in me began to wonder, what will happen to the roads as fewer and fewer cars run on gasoline? Who will pay to fix the streets?
Will toll roads become universal to bridge the funding gap?
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How Electric Cars Could Make America's Crumbling Roads Even Worse
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But what can you do with it?
-- ubiquitous cry from Linux-user partner
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:11PM (9 children)
Well, almost all countries variously already have:
Vehicle Excise - literally charging you each year to have the vehicle legally on the road anyway.
Electricity tax - charge you a per-user, specific, usage-based charge based on your actual electricity consumption in a simple manner (no matter what purpose the electricity is used for).
Tolls and other usage taxes - literally per-road, per-mile, per-usage, whatever you like.
A sales tax on certain vehicle types.
Local council tax - the people who have to fix most roads anyway.
etc. etc.
There are plenty of already-existing, already-collected taxes that can just be increased no problem at all to compensate. You would hope that a usage-based one is used to penalise people who are damaging the roads more compared to those who don't even own a car, for instance. That leaves you with electricity taxes and road-usage taxes. Road-usage requires an awful lot of infrastructure, which would be paid for somewhat by the taxes, but it's also a lot of upheaval and politicially-risky. Electricity tax can be slowly ramped up today, in tiny increments and requires nothing more than a bit of paperwork, and people will barely notice until it's too late.
Welcome to the world post-subsidy - affecting solar, electric cars, wind turbines, all kinds of things. The government granted you a reprieve to make the technology popular. Now that it's popular, they're going to tax it. That's how it works. Prepare to see all your subsidies dissipate, all your costs rise (including purchase and usage), and all the advantages that electric cars *did* have disappear into the void.
Gimme a call when electricity is twice the price it is now, high-power fast-charging comes only at a premium (relative to the contribution to peak load), there are only pathetic prices available for selling power back to the grid (thereby finally representing the reality of that situation), you have to pay the same road/vehicle taxes as everyone else has for 50 years, and it almost becomes cheaper to burn your old fuel to generate your new electricity fuel at home as it does buy the electricity yourself.
Subsidies are for things the government wants to happen.
Punitive taxes are for things the government considers harmful and doesn't want to be happening (e.g. inheritance taxes, carbon-taxes, etc.).
All other taxes are for things the government wants you to do a lot and not be able to avoid in order to generate money for them (e.g. sales taxes).
You've passed the subsidies stage. The punitive taxes will now start to apply to things producing carbon (and thus costing countries money in compliance and fines from international organisations). So your ICE car will now be taxed into oblivion - which earns money and also pushes people to electricity. And then they will be expecting to recoup all those subsidy payments - plus interest - plus make more on top enough to perform all the usual expected services, plus a bit of "profit" from the other taxes that they *already* impose just by changing what it applies to (e.g. electric cars the same as diesel cars, etc.).
If you don't get that, then you never will understand governments and taxation. It's only good business sense, so it's *really* hard to argue against it. They helped spark the industry. They gave it assistance and carved exceptions to the rules. Now those dissipate and they'll find a way to tax it into perpetuity.
A tax on electricity would be my bet. Governments are gearing up to do that. It would fund electrical generation and all their not-very-profitable green-electricity ventures. It would reduce overall carbon emissions. It would apply to everyone. It's incredibly hard to avoid without even more expense on your behalf. And with the UK making noises towards stopping natural gas being fitted to new properties, it's obvious where we're being led to.
An all-electric world, with large electricity taxes the same as current fuel taxes.
I can't even say that it feels wrong. It doesn't.
Electricity usage and production will end up getting taxed heavier. And maybe toll-roads etc. will increase (which has a nice side-effect of controlling/monitoring which vehicles are on the road and paid their OTHER taxes). But, for sure, the free-ride given to electric cars is over, and solar and wind etc. will start to follow suit.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:25PM
In the US road maintenance costs are split somewhat evenly between Federal, State, County and City. I worked at the State level DOT for a short while, but long enough to experience the ongoing constant negotiation between the levels of government about who takes responsibility for maintenance of which roads.
In general, you'll see it in the highway names: Intrastate/US highways are _usually_ federally maintained, State Road X would _usually_ be state maintained, and the local feeders, neighborhood streets, etc. are handled by their respective county or city.
In specific, they horse trade responsibility for roadway miles back and forth between the levels - for instance when a City wants to more than basic improvement on a State road, they might exchange responsibility for that portion of that road for an equivalent number of road miles that they would otherwise be responsible for. That's about the simplest of examples, politics is rarely that simple.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:44PM (7 children)
Too late already down-under. [abc.net.au]
If they continue to raise the electricity prices, I'm gonna buy batteries and disconnect from the power grid; it'll be more cost effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:14PM (1 child)
Isn't that antisocial? Probably racissss too!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:58PM
Nope, just asocial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:43PM (4 children)
Did you even read the article that you linked to? The price rises appear to be unrelated to taxation -- in fact, there has been a reduction in taxes on electricity.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:18PM
The price rises are because they sold off the public electricity infrastructure to the private sector. And naturally when you have no real competition or repercussions, you raise prices as much as you can get away with. There are legal limits to the price hikes, but like toll roads they are well above the inflation rate here in Au.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:35PM (2 children)
And? How's that relevant for how much I pay on electricity?
You reckon if the price gonna go up because of taxes is gonna make less a hole in my pocket?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday February 27 2019, @03:43AM (1 child)
Sigh.
Go back to your original post:
See, your post was in the context of taxes rising on electricity and you wrote that it was "Too late", implying that taxes had already caused an increase in taxes on electricity.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 27 2019, @03:59AM
Sigh
(I'll let aside the "taxes had already caused an increase in
taxesprices on electricity")No, what I'm implying is "with so high prices already, any increase will immediately be noticed, because many people - myself included - are already on the edge of their patience with this shite!" (in contrast with "people will barely notice").
Is it clearer now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0