Over here (Finland), tax revenue from fuel and vehicle taxes is 7 G€ per years, government expenditure on roads is in the order of 1 G€ per year. There is no relationship of vehicle/gas taxes and road maintenance; taxes are just general revenue.
And I think it's just the same in most countries: taxes are just taxes, general revenue; not earmarked money for some particular purpose.
(What baffles me is that the gas tax in U.S. is so low; that contributes to the situation where vehicles are often very large and consume ridiculously high amounts of fuel).
It's obviously problematic but the impetus: missing tax revenues to pay for infrastructure - is a very real issue.
If as it turns out fuel taxes were major contributors to paying for the roads that make cars possible ... well, this issue has to be addressed.
Ecological issues aside, the underlying economic impacts are real, and we should consider them enlightening in a way because they help us understand just how much things cost, how they get paid for, and what we're going to need to do if we want to realign everything.
Without knowing the breakdown ... maybe it's just possible that good chunk of 'gas savings' is really just 'not having to pay taxes which pay for roads'.
Maybe as a commenter above pointed out, it's only closer to '$200/year' - fair enough, but I think even a $200 tax might be unsettling to us as well.
I don't know what the answer is, but whatever it is, we can't ignore some of these realities.
I think the portion of gasoline tax for road maintenance amounts to less than a cent per mile, while the frequently quoted cost for road maintenance is 5-6c per mile per car. Thus it is already being funded from other sources.
Gas tax does not go nearly enough of the way to paying for infrastructure. Most road maintenance is paid for by property and income taxes.
$0.25/gallon is peanuts. New York (State) consumed ~135 million barrels of gas last year. That's 1.35 billion dollars of gas taxes. (Less in reality, because some commercial uses are exempt from these taxes, or can deduct them as expenses.)
The NY DOT's maintenance budget, alone is ~$4.5 billion USD. Not to mention another $7 billion earmarked for new construction.
Increase the gas taxes to $2.5/gallon, and then I'll agree that road users, in aggregate, are paying their way, instead of freeriding.
Yes, but those costs are still disproportionately low compared to road wear and value per trip. Cars and light trucks pay fuel taxes simply because regressive, automatically applied taxes are easy to collect and aren’t challenged by effective legislation.
Power and fuel are still taxed on usage basis. There is no real difference except that road maintenance is also funded by a basic fee. It's a two way system.
Last time I checked the figures, at a Federal level at least, fuel taxes did cover the costs of maintaining the highway system. If the highway system needs more maintenance, increasing the fuel tax by a relatively small amount would likely cover it.
I'm generally not one to argue in favor of taxation, but fuel taxes are essentially user fees for the road system. Unless and until most cars use something as an energy source that's hard to tax in this way, it's a viable, and mostly fair way to pay for roads. There's even a significant correlation between a vehicle's fuel economy and how much damage it does to the road, as both are closely related to weight.
The interstate system is almost profitable for the government. Fuel taxes raise somewhere around 30 billion to 40 billion a year, and the amount spent in interstate system maintenance every year is about that amount. If they increased the tax slightly, and stopped siphoning money off of it to fund non-road expenditures, it would be in the black.
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