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That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consump

by causi 4y ago

That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax) That is the entire point. Why are we subsidizing other peoples' bad decisions? If you want to go shop for fast fashion every other day or drive a 9,036-pound electric Hummer the rest of us should not pay the price for your jackassery.

happyopossum 4y ago
I think you’re trivializing the effect that shipping costs have on every day necessities. Far more trucks haul produce and other groceries around my neighborhood than ‘fast fashion’, and as we are seeing right now significant increases in those prices have an outsized effect on the most vulnerable.
- causi 4y ago
  I can't find any data on what products make up what proportions of the gross weight of land shipping. Without that data it's not productive to debate who would be most hurt by shipping trucks losing their road-wear subsidy.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    > Without that data it's not productive to debate It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the people who have a 4Runner for a household with one kid but their stupidity might just be collateral damage of an otherwise decent overall system.
    - causi 4y ago
      It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying I can't find data backing up your statement. It would be good if you were right because that would mean the world as it is currently is slightly better than if I was right. Regardless, disincentivizing total shipped mass is not entirely a bad thing. It disincentivises planned obsolescence and poor quality products in favor of reliable, repairable goods.
- est31 4y ago
  The current system might cause the entire economy to spend more on transportation overall. A 2 times as heavy truck might be able to transport 3 times as much as a "baseline" truck (these numbers are off, but it usually scales sublinearly), but it causes 16 times the wear of one trip. That means that switching to that heavier truck model causes 5.333 times of the wear on your country's roads. Now if you let everyone pay a mostly flat tax, it means that there is no motivation for logistics companies to have a larger number of trucks, because it means they have to pay for more drivers, etc. Say that all logistics companies switch to the bigger trucks and now only pay half of their costs, so e.g. 3 billion instead of 6 billion per year. Now assume that road maintenance used to cost 1 billion annually. With the new system it will cost 5.33 billion. So you have savings by the logistics companies of 3 billion per year contrasted by additional maintenance expenses of 4.33 billion per year. So your economy now spends 1.33 billion more per annum on transport, if it's through a higher base rate on your car's license or through more income taxes being redirected for road maintenance instead of building schools or whatever. These numbers are totally made up for me, and were only meant to demonstrate that not internalizing externalities can lead to inefficiencies. It's true that if you increase taxes for heavy trucks, customers will notice it via grocery store price increases. That's maybe the problem why it's not being done, because voters notice it way less that a road repair is more expensive and thus a school can't be renovated or something.
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    Correct, and this is something people often fail to understand about the free market. The market is making optimizations like the one you just suggested above (using smaller trucks over larger ones) constantly, innovating to reduce costs in thousands of ingenious little ways no single person could possibly come up with on their own. And those optimizations aren't just confined to first order effects, they cascade across the entire market. A small change to the cost of transportation by truck will, over time, result in the entire economy making millions of small adjustments to optimize for that cost. But the market can't optimize for a cost it doesn't know about. If you're just funding road construction and maintenance with income taxes and people aren't paying those costs in proportion to usage, then there's zero reason for the market to do anything to try to reduce those costs.
TimPC 4y ago
I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.
- avar 4y ago
  Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles. Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect. Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year. 1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
    - avar 4y ago
      Let's leave the specific numbers aside and just assume that there's a huge gap, e.g. ~$10 to ~$30k. You still haven't explained why that "doesn't work". Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for. Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb. If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.

by causi 4y ago

happyopossum 4y ago

I think you’re trivializing the effect that shipping costs have on every day necessities. Far more trucks haul produce and other groceries around my neighborhood than ‘fast fashion’, and as we are seeing right now significant increases in those prices have an outsized effect on the most vulnerable.

causi 4y ago
I can't find any data on what products make up what proportions of the gross weight of land shipping. Without that data it's not productive to debate who would be most hurt by shipping trucks losing their road-wear subsidy.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  > Without that data it's not productive to debate It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the people who have a 4Runner for a household with one kid but their stupidity might just be collateral damage of an otherwise decent overall system.
  - causi 4y ago
    It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying I can't find data backing up your statement. It would be good if you were right because that would mean the world as it is currently is slightly better than if I was right. Regardless, disincentivizing total shipped mass is not entirely a bad thing. It disincentivises planned obsolescence and poor quality products in favor of reliable, repairable goods.
est31 4y ago
The current system might cause the entire economy to spend more on transportation overall. A 2 times as heavy truck might be able to transport 3 times as much as a "baseline" truck (these numbers are off, but it usually scales sublinearly), but it causes 16 times the wear of one trip. That means that switching to that heavier truck model causes 5.333 times of the wear on your country's roads. Now if you let everyone pay a mostly flat tax, it means that there is no motivation for logistics companies to have a larger number of trucks, because it means they have to pay for more drivers, etc. Say that all logistics companies switch to the bigger trucks and now only pay half of their costs, so e.g. 3 billion instead of 6 billion per year. Now assume that road maintenance used to cost 1 billion annually. With the new system it will cost 5.33 billion. So you have savings by the logistics companies of 3 billion per year contrasted by additional maintenance expenses of 4.33 billion per year. So your economy now spends 1.33 billion more per annum on transport, if it's through a higher base rate on your car's license or through more income taxes being redirected for road maintenance instead of building schools or whatever. These numbers are totally made up for me, and were only meant to demonstrate that not internalizing externalities can lead to inefficiencies. It's true that if you increase taxes for heavy trucks, customers will notice it via grocery store price increases. That's maybe the problem why it's not being done, because voters notice it way less that a road repair is more expensive and thus a school can't be renovated or something.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Correct, and this is something people often fail to understand about the free market. The market is making optimizations like the one you just suggested above (using smaller trucks over larger ones) constantly, innovating to reduce costs in thousands of ingenious little ways no single person could possibly come up with on their own. And those optimizations aren't just confined to first order effects, they cascade across the entire market. A small change to the cost of transportation by truck will, over time, result in the entire economy making millions of small adjustments to optimize for that cost. But the market can't optimize for a cost it doesn't know about. If you're just funding road construction and maintenance with income taxes and people aren't paying those costs in proportion to usage, then there's zero reason for the market to do anything to try to reduce those costs.

TimPC 4y ago

I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.

avar 4y ago
Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles. Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect. Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year. 1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.
- TimPC 4y ago
  I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
  - avar 4y ago
    Let's leave the specific numbers aside and just assume that there's a huge gap, e.g. ~$10 to ~$30k. You still haven't explained why that "doesn't work". Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for. Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb. If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.