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In an ideal world, taxes collected from cars (either by mileage or by gasoline taxes, plus tolls) would be used to fund construction and emergency services for the highways. None of this money could be applied to the general budget. On the flip side, all road construction and maintenance costs, as well as costs of emergency services (i.e., ambulances to pick up injured people on the roads) would be funded through use taxes. This seems only fair.

I don't have a problem per se with Oregon using newer technology to tax people, except there are some scary potential misuses of the data collected.

However, I am sure that Oregon is using road taxes and fees to fund other budget needs, which does not seem fair.

In an ideal world, taxes collected from cars (either by mileage or by gasoline taxes, plus tolls) would be used to fund construction and emergency services for the highways. None of this money could be applied to the general budget.

Here in the "workers paradise" of Wisconsin we had a gas tax which was placed in a "highway trust fund" to facilitate infrastructure repairs. The fund grew over the years to $100,000,000 and some genius in Madison floated a bill to subsidize the urban bus system in Racine by $1,000,000. After all, it was only 1% of the trust. The next year Milwaukee lobbied for and got a $10,000,000 subsidy for the County Transit Authority. This went on for several years with ever larger withdrawals. Eventually someone noticed the overall declining nature of Wisconsin highways and bridges and suggested it was time to undergo some repair work. They looked into the cookie jar and the "highway trust fund" was completely depleted. (No big surprise, that!) The answer that Madison proposed was to increase the gas tax, meanwhile bus riders all over the state were paying $0.50 for a ride.

The moral of this little story is: "Never trust a politician with a trust fund."

Regards,
GtG

I agree with you Ko, I think the concept if good in principle, as it is a very fair system if the money is earmarked only for the roads.

However, we all know what happens when the government does anything, it screws it up. There is no doubt the money would be misused, another beaurocrisy would be created, and the data would get in the wrong hands and be used against you.

I would have a hard time voting for something like this.