Idiot. If you have the right to breathe clean air, then you better move to some remote part of alaska. When you goto a store, do you really believe they grow/raise/produce/manufacture everything behind that door that says "employee's only"? If its that important to you, for starters, unplug your computer and start using a candle. Somewhere your electricity is being produced,and its polluting someone elses "right to clean air".
People can't change this type of behavior overnight, especially in this environment. It requires buying new cars or moving to new homes. A $1 gas tax hike overnight would simply punish past behavior, rather than encouraging future behavior. If you believe a $1 gas tax is a good idea, it seems that the best way to do it would be over a several year period.
That is why there are emission standards. I drive a Hybrid Civic. This doesn't hurt me much, but I have a serious problem with it.
It's like you didn't even make it to the first week Sam. I personally haven't decided whether you believe in Socialism or Communism yet.
I don't get the math. 15 miles to work + 15 miles to home = 30 miles a day x 5 days = 150 miles / 15 gallons = 10 mpg. Hummers get better mileage than that. I can figure it backwards. 15 gallons x 25 mpg(4 dr sedan) = 375 miles - 150 miles( back and forth to work for 5 days) = 225 miles. Even if we take into account dropping off the kids at a very far school, she should still be profitting.
Another solution to this is simply to raise the minimum fuel efficiency standards. Interesting factoid: Replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 55 MPG. Since people drive pretty similar distances regardless of what car they own, the focus should be on getting rid of the really low mileage stuff.
You're the idiot. I didn't say you have no right to drive. I didn't say you can't use electricity. What I said was that excessive driving has a negative impact on everyone around you, and it is perfectly reasonable that you should have to pay a tax to counter that.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would agree that an overnight $1 tax hike would be really extreme, but considering that gas is now more than $2 cheaper than it was just about six months ago, I don't think it's as big a deal now. I also wouldn't have a problem with imposing the tax gradually, but the post I was responding to was talking about a 15 cent increase. That's just not nearly enough to change people's behavior. We've seen in the last year that $4 per gallon seems to be the magic number that changes behavior, so raising prices from $1.75 to $1.90 over the course of an entire year will do nothing.
Really the only way somebody can get around paying excessive gas taxes is to live close to work. Most people work in the city. So we will have a rush to move into the city. With so many people wanting that land, it will skyrocket in value because the land is finite. Only the upper crust will be able to afford it. Again...only the little guy loses.
That depends on what sort of development patterns you have. Not everyone needs to be packed into Manhattan type density but you could have clusters of neighborhoods and businesses that are scaled close enough so that you don't need to drive very far or could walk or bike. For trips to the central city good mass transit could take off driving pressures. Also with the Internet a lot of office work can be done out of the office from home or sattelite offices not requiring long commutes.
This could sort of work if you're starting a country off from scratch, but we have 300 million people already in place here. Everyone can't just suddenly live near their work and businesses can't suddenly move to the suburbs. Beyond that, if you penalize working further away from your job, you both decrease the pool of people a business can hire from, and you decrease the job opportunities for an individual. That hurts both the employers and employees. It's an inefficient way of distributing a labor force. To think of it in the opposite terms, if we all had teleportation devices and could work anywhere in the country, we could much better distribute people in terms of homes and work. You'd have lower unemployment and could much more easily replace a lost job since you wouldn't have to uproot your life. For example, you could get the best people working in the tech industry in San Francisco without the added burden of the costs of having a high density of people there. A gas tax (in limited terms of how it affects employment) is a small version of the opposite of this.
It doesn't matter where you live. People who work out of an office have a much much smaller impact than those who don't. I was peaking out at $1000 a month in fuel for business alone. All my profits were going to fuel. Raising a gas tax only does one of two things ... puts people out of work and/or raises the price of goods. The squeeze gets put on everyone and you can guarantee there will be people/companies taking advantage of it.
Don't businesses get a tax deduction for gas? My brother charges his gas on a reward card and deducts the gas. Are there special regulations for your business excluding your deduction?
Per the tax code, you can either deduct milage or you can do write offs on losses (gas/maintenance/repairs/depreciation/ect...) To do the latter, you must have a established business. Generally you use the latter if you have employees working for you, but like myself, I do contract work, so mileage works best for me. Your question leads to the other issue, rewriting tax code. At this point, you're running in circles. Commercial work is the brunt of fuel consumption. Business owners would get bigger tax writeoffs, making the process more complicated, only to punish a few joy riders?
So are you saying since it would be difficult on everyone now to change things we should just continue with our unsustainable lifestyles? If you don't think the gas tax is the correct solution, what would you propose? And no, you can't say we should invest in developing teleportation devices.
There are plenty of ideas. This isn't like a sin tax, where its a win/win situation. We are DEPENDENT on oil. We MUST have it. What can we do? Immediately, we can stop the waste and conserve. At home, we don't need 3 TV's, 2 computers, radio, and all the lights on. Businesses need to start carpooling incentives. Mid - longer term - Increase rail/mass transit uses. We need alternative energy options. A couple solar panels per residence would do wonders. Punishing people immediately for something they can't control will only make the problem worse.
I'm not going to say it won't be difficult but it can be done. In the last 20 years alone there's already been a large movement towards more sustainable land use development with many metro areas like Houston and Atlanta building better transit along with urban redevelopment to increase density. Many suburbs have taken up New Urbanist principles to building mixed use town centers that combine housing and business. So the process has already been going on. Stuff like this though doesn't happen on its own and there needs to be an impetus for it. The problem is that if there isn't something that directly drives it we will be forever locked in a cycle of inefficient development. Also if you believe that development patterns can't be changed consider that it only took about 20 years to create our suburban development pattern.
Yes and no. I am saying it would be unreasonable to implement and wouldn't accomplish the stated goals. It would hit the poor disproportionately because they are least able to move, least able to buy new vehicles, and most likely to have to take any job available regardless of distance. It would raise the cost of all goods due to commercial transportation costs which can't be reduced. It makes SS/Medicare dependent on general treasury revenue which is a massive can of worms we don't want to open. And if it did actually result in less driving, it would no longer be revenue-neutral because you'd have less tax revenues, which would mean SS/Medicare would go bankrupt sooner. All around, I don't think it's a good solution. That doesn't mean there isn't a good solution. As I pointed out above, replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 55 MPG. Why not focus on getting rid of the 14 MPG fuel-inefficienct vehicles? Either raise the basic fuel standards or charge a tax on new vehicles that don't meet a basic minimum. It uses innovation to solve the problem and doesn't penalize people retroactively for their choices - plus it cuts gas usage without requiring people to cut their job options or living options or anything like that, because it cuts the gas per mile instead of the miles.
