TomT said:
I'm not even going to bother to dignify such a ludicrous and poorly-reasoned comment with a response...
DanCar said:
TomT said:
This one I disagree with. EVs and ICEs should be treated the same from a vehicle use tax standpoint since they both use the same roads and contribute to their demise equally... There is really no reason why EVs should be given a free pass...
ICE should be taxed heavily because they are killing people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_emissions" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
One reason for taxes is to take externalities into account. The roads are "free", mostly, and it is hard to see how they could be anything but that. Everyone uses the roads, and most of the roads are are "free" to drive on. So then the wear on the roads from driving on them is a fine example of an externality. So a tax on vehicles roughly proportional to the wear and tear on the roads is one way of dealing with the situation that is both reasonably close to fair and doesn't have any perverse incentives. There are other externalities as well. Urban air pollution is a fine example. How to deal with this problem? We might just ignore it, and let the pollution kill people. We might regulate air pollution, by putting tight limits on the total pollution that one car can emit. Or we might tax the pollution.
Ignoring the cost of pollution leads to perverse incentives. A car that is a few dollars cheaper and pollutes a lot more is a "better" deal to the owner, but a far worse deal to everyone that must breath the pollution, suffering perhaps thousands of dollars in damages from health effects for every dollar "saved" by the owner of the car.
Regulating air pollution is the main way that we have dealt with the problem in the past. This can work, but can also lead to perverse incentives. For example, someone in a very rural area may be required to meet the standard needed to get city air clean, and this might not make economic sense as the emitted pollution has little effect in the sparsely populated rural area.
Or we might just tax air pollution. In an ideal case, if we taxed air pollution at the cost to others, and spend the tax collections on treating the sickness and otherwise compensating the harm from pollution, we might have a complete set of "economically fair" incentives. This would lead to higher taxes on ICE cars than electric cars, which isn't ludicrous.
Now, there is no ideal solution. Regulation has real advantages over taxation in some cases, even though it is less economically "fair".