Many people wonder why they should pay taxes for roads they never drive on or for an inter-coastal ferry system, which is subsidized with tax dollars which they will never ride on; all good questions indeed. A fuel tax on each gallon of fuel makes sense because those who use the most fuel travel the most distance and thus use the road the most.
Those with more fuel-efficient cars generally drive lighter cars, which weigh less and are less damaging to the road. In the future people who drive hybrids or even fuel cell vehicles will be paying nothing in the way of gasoline or diesel fuel taxes because they will not be buying any. Thus the more people who buy such cars the more the remaining people will have to pay for the roads while so many with hybrids pay so little or those with fuel cells pay none at all? Sure one could say it serves those gas guzzlers right. But there will come a time with the taxes on gasoline will be so high since so few are paying in that the system will collapse and the roads will become in a state of disrepair.
Additionally less fortunate and lower class will not be able to afford new fuel cell cars and will be paying the most, exactly what our most liberal citizens complain about. Federal Reserve Chairmen Greenspan before retirement discussed the need that a use tax of services was appropriate to alleviate problems like this in many sectors of the economy, not just roads and transportation.
One place I see emerging, as a critical point in all of this is the large over the road trucks and their wear and tear on the highway infrastructures. In many places we have toll-ways, which would account for such usage, yet in other parts of our nation we have freeways. We cannot turn them into toll-ways without jeopardizing already insane traffic bottlenecks out in the Midwest, West and Southern States. But luckily most over the road trucks have transponders for communication and routing information for GPS systems and to the trucking company dispatch.
I propose that the road usage tax be re-calibrated to more mirror the actual usage of the highways and that we use the already installed Commercial Carrier Trucking Transponders. This way small trucking companies that work locally are not charged the same fees that interstate trucks pay and that the monies go to where the most wear and tear is occurring.
You see we just cannot trust high-powered politicians to redistribute monies in districts that do not deserve them, as we all suffer, as well as our infrastructures when this is done. Nor can we trust an archaic system, which is unfair to the taxpayer, whether it is you or I or a commercial enterprise. More thoughts like this in 2006.
"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington
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