California Mileage Tax Would Charge Drivers Based on Distance Driven

a reply to: DietJoke

Continuing on with the maths ... I dug up the annual USA household expenditure pdf and I noted that for a median average household income of $65,596 before tax per year, and an after tax income of $51,442, whist spending $1,986 on gasoline and motor oil per year, and using the imaginary average car I used in my first post with 20mpg and a 15 gallon tank driving on average 15,000 miles per yer that boils down to ...

15,000 miles per year / 20mpg = 750 gallons bought per year.

750 x 52.9c = $396.75 in state government fuel surcharge tax or about 20% of the $1,986 yearly cost on gasoline and motor oil.

Now lets look at how much that would increase by with the taxation by the mile ...

15,000 miles per year / $0.05 = $750 per year in total tax per miles driven and that is about $350 [$750-$396.75] more per year onto the $1,986 cost bringing it up to $2,736 for a grand total of a 38% increase on the original cost.

This equates to about $1 per day extra to drive anywhere on average distances in an average car.

In the bigger scheme of things this equates to ...

$350 / ($51,442 / 100) = 0.68% of the median household annual income after taxes.

Now the $350 extra has to come from somewhere and I suggest that it would impact on the households yearly charitable cash contribution donations worth $1,913 per yer down to $1,563, which is an 18% drop in over all charity.

So although in the large scheme of things it is only a minor increase in cost i.e. +0.68% per year where as where that small extra cost impacts in the annual household expenditure chart can lead to devastating social impacts i.e. -18% charity per year!

The State governments need to be very careful playing such high stakes roulette with the economy.

I did not even consider funding the extra cost out of the entertainment and communication budget as everybody needs to stay even more connect online when cant travel much as one would need to reduce ones total average distance driven per yer by almost half, from 15,000 miles down to about 8,000 miles so as to not incur the extra cost under the new system of taxation.

So what to do ... reduce ones total yearly average distance traveled by almost half or reduce ones charity donations by 18%

These taxes are the symptoms of a systemic problem. Basically what you have is a smaller and smaller tax paying population with a larger and larger benefit claiming population. The result is massive state and municipal borrowing to stay afloat. The only reason it has gone on this long is that California has a lot of high tech industry.

California has the highest population percentage of Illegal aliens in the country. It also has the highest population percentage claiming welfare. 33% of the entire nation's welfare recipients reside in California, despite California making up only 12% of the nation's population.

This tax is a symptom of the welfare state that California is becoming. Every wellfare state in the history of the world has been uncompetitive. A shining current example is North Korea.

Something very similar happened to Greece just a few years ago.

a reply to: Fylgje
Have you seen how much California pays their government officials? I saw a chart once with a parks employee making 6 figures! That wasn't even the worst of it. There were so many people in non essential positions making huge sums of cash. I'm looking for the chart now it was on an old post I think.

originally posted by: Phoenix
In another thread bike trails were brought up for some reason and well it is one of the places where the revenue from automobile user fees paid in fuel taxes are used instead of being used to fix or replace existing highway infrastructure. Others used the point that "user" fees are desirable in justifying California's proposal - well OK lets apply that directly to the other posts $15,000,000 upfront dollar cost of bike trails using traditional tolls as an example to pay for and maintain the project.

On a 10 year basis construction and cost to maintain might approach $30,000,000. Lets say there are 1000 hardcore bicycle commuters and the rest are intermittent recreational riders - ok.

Due weather and seasons the 1000 people ride 125 working days in a given year. So that's 250 one way toll trips per individual per year. In 10 years that's 250,000 trips.

$30,000,000 divided by 250,000 trips = $120 per trip or $240 a day of taxpayer subsidy so they can enjoy a free commute on a dedicated trail. If this is the case how about we taxpayers just give you $125 a day to just stay home, by god it'd be cheaper!

Someone please point out how that's really cost effective or just how that kind of money spent this way is in anyway superior to spending the money where it was supposed to go in the first place?

Detractors can put my number to 10,000 riders a day but still its $12 a day - I for one have never ever seen any use of bike trails that even approaches the 1000 a day number so my guess is the subsidy for those folks is even a greater travesty to the taxpayer who wonders just why their government asks for more and more money to fix that which should already have been fixed long ago if the money was appropriately used.

Detractors could say I should use a 30 year bond, well that just exponentially increases maintenance and repair costs.

I am in no way "anti-bicycle" but if you want dedicated roadways then pay for them yourselves through tolls. You need it too for the other 125 days not soaking the taxpayers.

I have thought about this a lot lately because recently local governments have been removing traffic lanes to add bike lanes and in many cases these bike lanes are added to very busy commuter roads. Causing longer delays, but the thing that burns me most is that the bikers don't have to pay anything in return for the creation of these bike roads. I'm actually really surprised that no local government has reinstated the old bike operator license fees that were around in the 1950's. The cyclists are using the roads the same as the cars and are causing fees to be paid to designers and contractors, from taxes, to build these bike lanes and trails. They should pay a yearly fee, same as cars and their drivers do.

a reply to: DietJoke

If one went with the 'drive less average yearly distance' route then one would only be buying 1/2 as much petrol as normal [375 gallons per yer] making a huge saving of [$3.70(cost pf gasoline per gallon in USA today)-$0.529 (minus the current fuel surcharge tax) = $3.171 x 375 gallons per year =] $1,132.05 on fuel per year on average of 7,500 miles driven.

This would mean reducing 2gallons of fuel cost to travel the average 40miles driven per day ... down to 1 gallon and 20 miles traveled on average per day.

Now as the USA Suburbs are generally miles from any shops and one needs a car ...

As car ownership rose and wider roads were built, the commuting trend accelerated in North America. This trend towards living away from towns and cities has been termed the urban exodus.

During this time commercial shopping malls were being developed near suburbs to satisfy consumers' needs and their car–dependent lifestyle.

Suburbs in America have a prevalence of usually detached[22] single-family homes.[23]

They are characterized by:

Lower densities than central cities, dominated by single-family homes on small plots of land – anywhere from 0.1 acres and up – surrounded at close quarters by very similar dwellings.
Zoning patterns that separate residential and commercial development, as well as different intensities and densities of development. Daily needs are not within walking distance of most homes.
Subdivisions carved from previously rural land into multiple-home developments built by a single real estate company. These subdivisions are often segregated by minute differences in home value, creating entire communities where family incomes and demographics are almost completely homogeneous.[citation needed].
Shopping malls and strip malls behind large parking lots instead of a classic downtown shopping district.
A road network designed to conform to a hierarchy, including culs-de-sac, leading to larger residential streets, in turn leading to large collector roads, in place of the grid pattern common to most central cities and pre-World War II suburbs.
A greater percentage of one-story administrative buildings than in urban areas.
A greater percentage of whites and lesser percentage of citizens of other ethnic groups than in urban areas. Black suburbanization grew between 1970 and 1980 by 2.6% as a result of central city neighborhoods expanding into older neighborhoods vacated by whites.
Compared to rural areas, suburbs usually have greater population density, higher standards of living, more complex road systems, more franchised stores and restaurants, and less farmland and wildlife.

And this means one NEEDS a car if one is living in the suburbs and one would have to compensate buy spending twice as much money on food for half the amount of transport and that requires more money in hand and that money simply comes from the fuel savings detailed above.

If everyone went the less charity route then that path would result in almost 1/5th less charity money for the entire year for any and all charity based organizations.

How much is that in real world U$D terms? ...

Well with 86,429,000 workers 2012 statistic working full time all year around, then 86,429,000 workers x $350 = $30,250,150,000 [Thirty Billion plus $'s ] less charity money donated per year on a national level scale.

That is $82,877,123.29 less per each day to help out the needy and the poor and with the 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers outnumbering the 86,429,000 full-time private sector workers 1.7 to 1 that would mean $0.53 less per needy person per day.

Since the poverty income threshold for a single person living in the USA is $11,720 per year, which = $32.11 earned for working an average 8hrs of work per day and $0.53 is 1.7% of their daily income and for people who already live desperately on the fringes and margins a -1.7% hit may mean the difference in paying their bills and going without food to survive.

It seems that going the drive less route looks far less damaging than going the pay less charity route!

Bit of a stupid tax really - some monster gas guzzling behemoth that f**ks the roads up with its weight & spews out a gallons worth of pollution every 2-5 miles pays the same per mile as a hybrid??

Why not tax the actual problem - fuel? that way you pay more if you travel more, and you also pay more if you have a gas guzzling monster....and you can rightfully point out that you ARE paying for it!

I was researching for unrelated stuff when I came across this very recent Australian news article ...

Budget 2014: Motorists to pay more with Coalition poised to reintroduce indexation of fuel excise

Millions of motorists will pay more for petrol as a result of next Tuesday's budget.

The ABC understands the Government is poised to change the indexation on the fuel excise.

Former Liberal prime minister John Howard abolished the indexation after introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2001.

Motorists have since paid 38.1 cents per litre in fuel excise, even though the price of fuel has nearly doubled since then.

I find it uncanny that the Australian Federal government would role this out at this time and it reeks of opportunism!

originally posted by: NiZZiM
a reply to: Fylgje
Have you seen how much California pays their government officials? I saw a chart once with a parks employee making 6 figures! That wasn't even the worst of it. There were so many people in non essential positions making huge sums of cash. I'm looking for the chart now it was on an old post I think.

Yeah, I've seen that. Sickening. There is mass corruption there, but then again, it's in every state these days. All of that tax money, salaries, etc., needs to be followed, in every state.

How is the govt proposing to administer this 'mileage tax'?

Are 'they' going to recruit an army of odometer checkers or let the driver declare it annually?

Sounds unmanageable to me and will potentially cost as much or more than the taxes collected. 'Winding back' of odometers is likely to become a common lurk once more.

originally posted by: Pilgrum
How is the govt proposing to administer this 'mileage tax'?

Are 'they' going to recruit an army of odometer checkers or let the driver declare it annually?

Sounds unmanageable to me and will potentially cost as much or more than the taxes collected. 'Winding back' of odometers is likely to become a common lurk once more.

That's what I was wondering
How would they know how many miles someone drove in a week/month
Or is it just a 'guesstimate' ?