4 ms·
Rather than giving any government more excuses to tax the individual, perhaps we should look into forcing governments to spend their money wiser and not write s
by tourmalinetaco 3y ago
Rather than giving any government more excuses to tax the individual, perhaps we should look into forcing governments to spend their money wiser and not write so many blank checks.
- jackvalentine 3y agoA road tax wouldn’t be about the revenue collection or government expenditure. It would be a pigouvian tax to disincentivise gigantic vehicles and their negative impact on everyone around them.
- ethanbond 3y agoIMO doesn’t even need to be framed as pigouvian. It’s just trying to match better what a person pays for a public service and what they consume from it, in this case road wear and tear.
- jackvalentine 3y agoRoad wear and tear is the starting point, but I worry more about increased road trauma and the loss of amenity that bigger vehicles cause. Letting them just ‘pay their way’ isn’t enough - we need to reverse course.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat? Presumably we need roads and it’s a fact of physics that heavier vehicles put more wear on them.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoI didn’t say we need to remove roads. I said governments should prioritize roads rather than wasting money unnecessarily.
- ethanbond 3y agoSo until the government (which?) meets someone’s (whose?) intuitive guess (how?) at what an appropriate degree of efficiency is, then we should not have public investment? Given almost any degree of govt efficiency I’d prefer more of it, but we do in fact need to be able to walk and chew gum. It’s just not the case that letting roads deteriorate will increase discipline in whatever area of govt your particular hobby horse lives.
- Mordisquitos 3y agoCalibrating road tax based on vehicle weight as a proxy for road maintenance costs is a step away from taxing the individual, which is the current situation with more-or-less flat road tax rates.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoThe problem is that any talk of additional taxes is unnecessary if governments can’t do their jobs with the money they have. Just recently, my small town had their roads paved. It cost $35,000 to bring a miller in, and the county engineer made a mistake where only 1 of our roads were being milled. It took another $35,000 to bring it back to do the rest. Adding taxes can’t fix government inefficiency, in fact they make it worse.