Why did you not address a key point of the comment you were replying to, which was that income taxes allow taxation to correlate with how well one is able to ca

Why did you not address a key point of the comment you were replying to, which was that income taxes allow taxation to correlate with how well one is able to carry the burden? It would be nice (and helpful to the overall signal-to-noise ratio) if we all here talked to each other rather than at each other. Two points on the topic of gas taxes: (1) While it is perhaps still true that the internet is not entirely privately funded (is it?), I'd be interested in actual numbers. Most likely, the public spending on cables is ridiculously tiny compared to the public spending on roads. (2) In some (many?) countries, gas taxes are also justified by environmental and sustainability concerns: they provide an economic incentive to reduce fuel consumption. I don't see a similar concern with mere bandwidth usage. An environmentalist may bring up the power consumption of data centres, but that is a slightly different issue: bandwidth used does not always correlate with compute power used, and so it is still no justification for an internet tax.