Green-The Color Of Tax
link States look to tax hybrid and electric car owners to recoup road funding | Fox News.
It’s hard to make stuff like this up. The image of the snake eating its own tail now has some real life examples. As many may know, the automobile and petroleum industry are responsible for incalculable benefits to the modern world, not only from their respective utilities but as importantly from the taxes associated with their use. Roads, highways and bridges couldn’t be afforded if taxation from fuel and vehicle sales didn’t exist. Up here on the west coast, fully half of the amount charged on a liter of gasoline are taxes of some sort or another.
If electric vehicles ever achieve ubiquity of common use for the average person, the taxes associated with petro fuel sales would plummet. According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, in 2009, there were over 254 million passenger vehicles registered in the U.S. As of 2011, there were an estimated 2 million hybrid electric vehicles.
Observing these statistics, this is unlikely to happen in the next decade or so unless there’s a quantum leap in battery technology. As of now, the workable range of most electric vehicles will barely allow for a trip to drop the kids off at school plus a run to Costco. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that all eco-vehicles are subsidized by governments at purchase, anywhere from $2500 to $7500 per vehicle. So what we have are more expensive, less efficient vehicles that will be taxed more than already efficient gasoline vehicles in order to maintain the same notional level of road tax budgets. This turns the classic Mies Van Der Rohe dictum of less is more on its head.
It’s not too much a leap of logic to draw the parallel with the hypothetical situation of hiring as many law enforcement officers as possible as a means to deter crime. At some point, at least in theory, there will be no criminals and you’ll have to tax the police just to keep paying them. Oddly, this has not happened in real life as the same scenario applied using lawyers has had just the opposite effect. Presently the United States and Canada have the most amount of practising lawyers ever in history. Strangely, life is neither necessarily easier nor safer. All that’s happened is that we’ve created a more byzantine legal system with potentially more lawbreakers. Naturally, to protect themselves, the people need to hire more lawyers.
Getting back to our unfolding drama regarding electric/green vehicles, taxing them may not be a bad thing since most who own them probably deserve to be taxed anyway. A large contingent are likely eco-weenie snobs and can afford to pay the exaggerated price in order to maintain their personal levels of smugness. However, the limited range of the cars will quickly annoy them when they get caught in one of the traffic jams of most major cities such as L.A. Chicago and New York. When the Chevy Volt dies only 3 miles from home, it’ll be back to the Tahoe.