> For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all
California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic.
For every two Teslas worth of subsidies, for rich people who might actually drive very little, you could buy a poor person who actually needs a car a whole Prius.
> Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road
As other people said everyone benefits from roads. Cyclists still need food delivered to grocery stations in trucks. Parents still have their kids driven around in busses. Everyone needs construction vehicles to build more housing.
The vast majority of the value of roads is realized by commuters. It's not even just the long-ass trip some sucker makes commuting from his low cost community in the boonies. There are a dozen different trucks that need to go that same trip to wildly inefficiently provide him with services.
The most logical thing to do would be to tax surburban and rural residents at a state level, and sending that money back to cities. That lifestyle is so preposterously inefficient as an alternative to paying a landlord absolutely more but relatively less to live in a city. Suburban and rural dwellers just externalize their costs to the city people collecting their garbage, running their government, banks and hospitals, teaching their kids, training their police, firefighters, running their courtrooms, etc. - stuff they imagine is in "their" communities but is essentially welfare from vastly richer cities.
I just want to chime in to say that it's true everyone benefits from roads, but not everyone benefits from ever wider roads and huge traffic machines. Delivery trucks and ambulances and what have you do not need 8 lanes and clover junctions. Those things are built to accommodate suburban commuters.
Sounds like the logical thing to do is to heavily tax employers that place offices in cities and force people to commute to the same place as everyone else where there isn’t adequate housing.
Additionally, heavy taxes should be levied on the city dwellers that devastate nearby communities to externalize their water supplies, their power generation, their food growth, etc.
I think you’ll pretty quickly find that you can make whatever lame arguments you want how people should and shouldn’t live. Just tax the specific negative externality you want to reduce and move on. Don’t sit there and moralize about other lifestyles.
California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic.
For every two Teslas worth of subsidies, for rich people who might actually drive very little, you could buy a poor person who actually needs a car a whole Prius.
> Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road
As other people said everyone benefits from roads. Cyclists still need food delivered to grocery stations in trucks. Parents still have their kids driven around in busses. Everyone needs construction vehicles to build more housing.
The vast majority of the value of roads is realized by commuters. It's not even just the long-ass trip some sucker makes commuting from his low cost community in the boonies. There are a dozen different trucks that need to go that same trip to wildly inefficiently provide him with services.
The most logical thing to do would be to tax surburban and rural residents at a state level, and sending that money back to cities. That lifestyle is so preposterously inefficient as an alternative to paying a landlord absolutely more but relatively less to live in a city. Suburban and rural dwellers just externalize their costs to the city people collecting their garbage, running their government, banks and hospitals, teaching their kids, training their police, firefighters, running their courtrooms, etc. - stuff they imagine is in "their" communities but is essentially welfare from vastly richer cities.