[Fierce Allegiance]

Also, a tax on the fuel consumed would be more fair, because a heavier vehicle (generaly) uses more fuel, and they do more damage to the roadbed. A pure milage-based tax would not distribute the cost as appropriately.

[dufekin]

Taxing fuel also implicitly encourages the conservation of fuel, although we conservatives prefer to reserve fuel and other vehicle-related taxes for the construction and maintenance of motor-vehicle-related infrastructure (i.e., road building and pothole filling).

Liberals now want us to raise fuel taxes to several dollars per gallon, and they also want to tax road usage on a highly complicated but inevitably extortionate (cf. IRS) per-mile time-dependent rate. They demand that the government spend these tax revenues on various non-road-related "social" programs. They simultaneously hope that such exorbitant taxes will cause Americans to abandon their automobiles, helping to spread general misery throughout the population but especially to the most economically challenged. Liberals, as any clear-thinking person recognizes, take pride in the misery and melancholy maladies that they can inflict upon society, desiring to draw power from those thereby made more miserable.