Editors at Issues and Insights offer readers another reason to oppose the government’s push toward electric vehicles.
“As fuel taxes plummet, states weigh charging by the mile instead of the tank.” That was the headline of a recent AP story, which should scare freedom-loving citizens everywhere. And you can place the blame squarely on government-subsidized EVs for this terrible new development.
The background is that state and federal gasoline taxes aren’t raising “enough” money these days to pay for roadway construction and maintenance. And a big reason for the growing shortfall is the increase in electric vehicles.
EVs get massive tax subsidies to convince people to buy them, but their owners don’t pay gasoline taxes, for the obvious reason that they never have to fill up. The more EVs on the road, the less revenue the gas taxes raise.
So the policy geniuses in Washington have a solution: Impose a per-mile tax.
Some states are already experimenting with “vehicle miles traveled” taxes, and the $1 trillion bi-partisan infrastructure bill includes $125 million for state and local pilot programs to test a national VMT fee.
A VMT sounds reasonable, right? After all, every driver imposes costs on roadways. And a mileage tax would capture all drivers, no matter what fuels their cars.
But look more closely, and the VMT tax is perhaps one of the most insidious tax ideas ever devised.
To start, a VMT tax would be incredibly complicated and costly to impose.
The gas tax is simple. A relatively small number of large fuel suppliers pay the tax, the costs of which are then passed on to retailers. But by definition, a VMT means collecting money directly from hundreds of millions of owners of hundreds of million cars. How?
One idea is to force motorists to have their odometers checked regularly, where they’d then be assessed a fee. But that would simply encourage widespread odometer fraud, which is already a problem.
