Posted on 07/03/2023 4:11:50 AM PDT by MtnClimber
"As fuel taxes plummet, states weigh charging by the mile instead of the tank.” That was the headline of a recent AP story, which should scare freedom-loving citizens everywhere. And you can place the blame squarely on government-subsidized EVs for this terrible new development.
The background is that state and federal gasoline taxes aren’t raising “enough” money these days to pay for roadway construction and maintenance. And a big reason for the growing shortfall is the increase in electric vehicles.
EVs get massive tax subsidies to convince people to buy them, but their owners don’t pay gasoline taxes, for the obvious reason that they never have to fill up. The more EVs on the road, the less revenue the gas taxes raise.
So the policy geniuses in Washington have a solution: Impose a per-mile tax.
Some states are already experimenting with “vehicle miles traveled” taxes, and the $1 trillion bi-partisan infrastructure bill includes $125 million for state and local pilot programs to test a national VMT fee.
A VMT sounds reasonable, right? After all, every driver imposes costs on roadways. And a mileage tax would capture all drivers, no matter what fuels their cars.
But look more closely, and the VMT tax is perhaps one of the most insidious tax ideas ever devised.
To start, a VMT tax would be incredibly complicated and costly to impose.
The gas tax is simple. A relatively small number of large fuel suppliers pay the tax, the costs of which are then passed on to retailers. But by definition, a VMT means collecting money directly from hundreds of millions of owners of hundreds of million cars. How?
“The fees can go up every year and payable when they renew their tags...”
That would be the likely approach across the board - DMV would have to verify your odometer reading when you renew your car tabs/plates.
Needs repeating because thismis exactly why they will implement it! It has nothing to do with “saving mother earth” and everything to do with tyranical control
“So a per-mile tax, depending on how it’s implemented, will give them information not only on how far you go, but also where and when you go, and how fast you go to get there. It will flag you if you go to the range, a gun store, a bar, a Trump rally, or a church or temple. It will know who you visit and whether that person is a “domestic terrorist”.”
As a Globalist in an earlier life, I can tell you that one of the things that really annoyed us was the ability of Americans to freely travel domestically without us having any way to manage these movements.
So, it’s clear to me that today’s Globalists will strongly support this new taxing scheme, especially considering the possibilities it opens up, which go FAR BEYOND anything being discussed now, and allow the per-mile rate to vary with:
1. Time of Day
2. Roads Traveled
3. Vehicle Size and Present Value
4. Whether other options exist (buses, trains, etc.)
5. Purpose of travel (critical things, like government meetings or Stinger production for Ukraine, or non-critical things like picking up kids from school or going shopping).
6. Income of vehicle owner
7. Political party of vehicle owner
8. Social credit score of vehicle owner
Hard to see a down side to this plan!
that will drive rveryone back to gas powered cars, defeating the very purpose of forcing electric cars on the citizens. limiting the distances you can drive makes it easier to control the people.
Great example, and painfully likely to occur.
Also, in the scenario you painted, there’s the added bonus to Leftists of manipulating people for votes.
Two weeks ago, my wife and I drove from Baltimore to eastern Wyoming. Just because we wanted to. That’s what Americans do.
I adjusted my route to bypass toll roads, because that’s what Americans do.
In Alabama that's already being done. When doing annual car registration (colloquially we call it getting our car tags) there's a $200 EV fee added to it for EV owners. That's on top of the fact that the car tag is ad velorem (meaning, people with expensive cars pay more than people we cheap cars, and EV's tend to be more expensive than ICE cars).
By my math, that comes out to about 15K miles of gas taxes. So if someone drives less than 15K miles or so per year, it's cheaper (gas tax) to drive an ICE car. But if someone drives more than 15K miles it's cheaper to pay the extra registration cost for EV's.
My math explained:
$200 EV line item.
Approximately $40 added by EV's costing more than comparable ICE cars. So call it $240 more for renewing the car tag of an EV.
The federal gas tax is 18.4¢/gallon and in Alabama the state gas tax is 28¢/gallon. That's total 46.4¢/gallon.
$240 ÷ 46.4¢/gallon = 517 gallons of gas you'd have to buy to pay $240 in gas taxes.
Assuming 30mpg that's 15K miles. (I went with 30mpg instead of 20mpg because the ad velorem $40 estimate was based on new EV vs new ICE car price, not new EV vs old ICE. If it was old ICE the ad velorem difference would be much higher than $40.)
To me that seems reasonably fair.
The target isn’t to collect more money (though that’s always attractive to our socialist government) - it’s to limit our movement.
EVs are short-range vehicles and there will never be enough power generation available to allow the freedom of movement we have now. Today, you can fuel up and drive the family all across the country at will. The all-powerful government doesn’t want that and aims to keep us in our communities (and preferably, unarmed).
The target isn’t EV’s, it’s control. There’s no expansion of the electrical infrastructure going on. Electricity is already rationed in CA.
Let me think about this a minute:
Charging electric vehicles will load and crash the power grid— so Americans use generators. This will increase the price of fuel, but it will still be cheaper to use gas.
But what if we quickly build a lot of nuclear power plants. They’ll need money to do this, so they’ll probably tax electricity more as taxes fall more often to the beneficiaries. They’ll tax oil too, but I think it will still be cheaper than electricity.
If they build the plants, the grid will be able to keep up with demand and eventually charging won’t cost so much as the dollar approaches the value of the rupee. .
But charging up your electric car will still cost more than filling your car with gas because the resultant drop in demand for that fuel will lead to an oversupply of gas and a drop in price.
Keep your gas car.
If the Leftists succeed in restricting travel through excessive "taxes" and requiring EVs and eliminating fossil fuels because of "warming", the new restrictions have the final effect of keeping us near home, easily tracked, and without the ability to escape.
What 5th Amendment protection do we have in that case?
All by design. They already had brownouts in the summer before the EVs were even a gleam in the Chinese battery makers' eyes.
Tried to rent a car from Hertz at LAX a couple of weeks ago. All they had left were EVs: nobody wanted them! I ended up renting from some guy named Hamid and I think it was his own family car..
Food production? Any such things as electric tractors or combine harvesters? How about moving refrigerated (or any) food to market?
The socialists are squeezing us in the jaws of a massive, fraud-driven trap.
The easiest way to collect the tax (lowest cost) would be to have the odometer checked at the time of the state emissions inspections. The data could be provided to the state and they could send a bill.
I am not advocating for the idea—and false odometer readings would be a huge issue—but that would be the cheapest way to do it.
I'm against government monitoring our driving. And in Alabama we don't have vehicle inspections.
“So if someone drives less than 15K miles or so per year, it’s cheaper (gas tax) to drive an ICE car. “
It is ALWAYS cheaper to drive an ICE car. Always.
BS right off the bat. It' the money they've raised from fuel taxes that may be down because they've put the kibosh on the average family's ability to travel due to inflation - that they themselves caused.
Exactly one of the reasons that my wife and I have both an EV car and an ICE pickup. In order to demobilize us, the Dims have to mess up both electricity and gas supplies. Just like our retirement portfolio is broadly diversified, I wanted our transportation energy dependency to be diversified.
Remember the gasoline shortages a year ago and, if you could find it, the cost at the pump was sky high? IMHO the cost is still too high. The gas shortage was a wake up call for us. And we don't want to be all EV either, as you rightly point out the Dims are in some ways limiting power and making power costs go up. Since we need 2 cars anyway, having one of each gives us options for trips. And having tons of solar at home makes 250 mile round trips self-powered.
I’ll leave the Math to you..no argument from me on that.
“”When doing annual car registration (colloquially we call it getting our car tags)””
That’s what GA calls them also - in CA we just had “car registration renewals”. GA has TAG offices - CA had DMV with everything in one place - drivers licenses, car registrations etc. GA has separate offices - some even in shopping centers. When in Rome - or when in GA...go with the flow!
Perhaps it is for most people. In our use case an EV makes sense. My wife and I put 26K miles on our new EV in the first year with no signs of slowing down. Plus we live in the south (read: better miles / kWh throughput than in the cold weather north). So in that year I saved both on tons of gas cost and also 5 oil changes (I religiously change oil every 5K miles in the old ICE pickup we still own and all the cars we've ever owned.) And here in Alabama our power costs are relatively cheap per kWh (though in our case we have tons of solar because we're trying to be mostly self-reliant with our energy to remove one of the ways the Dims control us, so we buy only 20% of our power from the grid, including power used to charge the EV).
I wouldn't suggest an EV unless you have a lot of variables making an EV in your favor. And even then, I still wouldn't do it unless you're married and need 2 cars anyway (there's a peace of mind having both an EV and an ICE so that the Dims have to make both gas and power hard to come by to demobilize us). And if you have a prepper mindset like we do and that's the reason for installing solar, then an EV goes with that and extends your mostly self-reliant energy use beyond the home and onto the road for local driving and the first 250 miles of a trip.
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