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?
Highway gas taxes also often pay for bike paths.
Growing up in Alabama, there are times I still refer to “eastern time” as “Georgia time”. LOL
ping
“Perhaps it is for most people.”
Never is an EV less expensive. Their purchase cost, alone, out costs the fuel of an ICE car. Their residual value sucks, too.
We have a 2022 Toyota Corolla, paid $27,000 total, tags, tax, and license. Fuel for 5 years is $5,000 at today’s high fuel prices. That’s $32,000 total, and maybe I might need tires at $500. I can then resell this car right now for $24,000. Have had offers. We also have other much more expensive vehicles, but this is the runabout. It takes the mileage so our irreplaceable vehicles don’t. Total cost to operate the thing over 5 years is about $10,000. You can’t possibly say that of an EV.
The cost in increased taxes to pay for those Superfund cleanup costs is staggering. The end of life costs, all of it, you pay for. Maybe not now, but you will. You are just stacking up the debt. You do pay taxes that go to EV costs right now, so you are paying some of that right now. We all are.
Your electric costs will go up once they have you by the short and curlies. There is already discussions of much, much higher electricity costs and even an EV surcharge.
EV’s are a sucker’s bet. They are someone thinking they are getting a free lunch but sucks at math.
EV’s were obsoleted a hundred years ago.
The modern ones just have a prettier body.
They have the same problems and short comings that they had in the 1920’s.
In the first instance it is just dumb to tax fuel as a flat tax instead of a percentage of the cost of the fuel. I see the desire to keep the revenue strream flat with floating fuel prices but if we can’t have a flat tax why do we have a flat fuel tax?
I’m all for taxing by the mile actually since I hardly go anywhere anymore. I drove 1,650 miles last year.
No, I don’t care anymore.
Actually, they have newer and far more dangerous problems: Lithium batteries. That’s new and far more dangerous than wet cell batteries.
Maybe it is for some folks. Since you're a fellow code jockey, then you probably care about how the micro-details add up in the overall plan.
This post is about half a year old, but explains the methods of my mathness. And note that my payback period for the overall EV / solar /other home energy improvements is now about April 2032 (less than 9 years from now). That's because I assume only a reasonable 3% inflation rate in future energy costs. But the Dims keep making energy costs go up faster than that YOY (which shortens my payback timeframe).
I never had a real opportunity to say, “...that mouse in your pocket...”, but I just did.
I know a guy who drove his Tesla from Detroit to Utah last fall for a softball tournament. It took him an extra day to drive due to locating charging stations and charging times than previous years when he drove his gas cars.
Solar never pays for itself at todays prices. It can’t. It takes more energy to make them than they generate. Also, their costs usually cross over even at 24 years, but they usually fail between 7-14 years. Duke Energy just put a 75 megawatt solar farm near us. I know Duke very well and found they never expect a return on that investment due to the failure rates.
Well, as you pointed out, maybe solar can be profitable if energy costs continue to skyrocket. A $20,000 solar system today might be worth it if electric costs shoot from an average of 12.5 cents per kilowatt to 50 cents or more.
Solar is great for off-grid situations and long term power outages such as after hurricanes so generator fuel is not consumed. It is what we are putting in for those very reasons. No cost benefits, but we’ll have power when the power goes out for days on end. As it is, our power is unreliable. It goes out during every thunderstorm.
A $20,000 solar system today might be worth it if electric costs shoot from an average of 12.5 cents per kilowatt to 50 cents or more.
This might be one area we disagree on the details. In Alabama we're charged 12.4384¢ per kWh, at least that's the official rate. But after the extra riders per kWh are added, along with the 4% state tax, the true kWh charge is higher (even after first subtracted flat monthly fees and tax). In my last power bill I was charged 16.58¢ per kWh (I calculated that by power bill being $37.16, subtracted $15.60 for the flat monthly fees and tax to get the $21.56 usage charge. Divide that by the 130kWh they say I pulled from the grid that billing period and it's a real world 16.58¢ per kWh). So when thinking about how much solar will save you, make sure you know the real world cost per kWh you're paying. In my case, my inverters reported me consuming 1869.7 kWh during that billing period. With only 130kWh pulled from the grid, my solar system saved me 1,739.7 kWh. Thus, the dollar savings was $288.52. And that's without me selling power to the grid. That's just plain ol' saving on my grid pull.
Combine that with # of miles driven and the cost of gas near me this past month (to get savings in gas from using an EV), but add in some cost since the EV did add to my power consumption some, and the same by no longer having a natural gas bill (because I replaced my water heater with a hybrid water heater, which added some to my power consumption, but not as much as it saved me on natural gas, plus the hybrid water heater helps cool the house which lowers some of the demand on my home's variable speed heat pump), and the overall energy savings was about $689 in June. It was $757 in May and $803 in April.
Because that would not result in double-taxation of non-EV vehicles.
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