Tax, Tax, Tax.

At least Indiana resisted the temptation to initiate a tax on Prius until a study was completed to see if it made sense. If Virginia had done a study they would have realized Prius was already over-taxed.

I was thinking to volunteer to Indiana to help study it, but I got busy on another project.

There is not much tax money here, $1.5 million in NC the article quotes. It is more a political message.
I got the message at a 5K road race this weekend in North Virginia (NoVA).

 

After reading a right-wing web page article, I posted this comment:

Bob Wilson

 

^^^
I haven't been following this thread so I don't know if I'm repeating others. Obviously, these crap taxes discourage people from buying more efficient vehicles when they should instead raise gas taxes to cover shortfalls to encourage buying more efficient vehicles so as to contribute less to environmental damage, worsening our trade deficit, contributing less to our national security problems, etc.

But the political "logic" of it is that since the US hybrid take rate is only ~3%, it sure seems like the other 97% won't mind and thus be for it/think nothing of it. To raise gas taxes would hit everyone and I doubt 97% would be for it.

 

It was never "math time". It was always right wing politics time.

The tax is not intended to replace "lost revenue". The tax is to punish high mpg car owners and to discourage people from becoming high mileage car owners by a wacky cabal of oil company paid legislators, religious nut climate deniers and just plain ignorant twits...an anti-American brew that's has managed to run up $14T in oil war debt while blaming it on Social Security and Medicare which have run a $2T surplus at the same time the oil war an up the $14T in debt. The tax on high mileage cars has its roots in the same political ideology.

 

There are so few Hybrid cars on the road they will be lucky to fill a few pot holes with the money. It is more a nuisance than a tax

 

Correct, in effect:

• cut gasoline sales taxes and add a hybrid subsidy tax -> gasoline fossil fuels become even more short-supply, gas prices increase faster than gasoline taxes can be cut.
• increase gasoline sales taxes for all -> grabs the 'wallet' and encourages fuel efficiency, prolonging the gasoline supply and spreading out the gas price increase.

Now there is an idea, put it up for a vote and elect the government we want.

Bob Wilson

 

I think you just hit the nail on the head !

 

It did go up for a vote, that's how it was passed. Northern Virginia wanted to make sure hybrid owners "pay their fair share".

 

As the policies of the current administration keep the poverty rate going up while keeping unemployment high, the hybrid "take rate" is going to continue to be low. As "affluent" hybrid owners, we must "pay our fair share". By lowering the gas tax and paying our $64 we will help subsidize those hit hard by the current administrations lack of economic understanding.

Census: U.S. Poverty Rate Spikes, Nearly 50 Million Americans Affected « CBS DC

Bureau of Labor Statistics Data

 

But they don't pay the bill, we do when we pay 200 bucks for an advil in the hospital. They charge the rest of us double to make up for the people with no ins. I'm sure 9 out of 10 people with no health ins that goes to the hospital never pays a dime of the bill.

 

....in VA the hybrid fee was something the Repubs stuck on a massive transportation bill at the last minute. The Democrats needed the tax money so badly, they had to accept the provision as a less than perfect solution. It was the last day of the legislative session, there was no way out. Of course, I did not like the solution the dems agreed to in the first place.

 

Social engineering at it's most clueless.

 

You're wrong on every count but the health care analogy made no sense so no point in belaboring you with the facts on healthcare when discussing the anti-American policy of taxing high mileage cars.

 

Wrong. The Prius owners are in Northern Virginia. The anti-American legislators forming the backbone of support for taxing fuel efficiency are the rural Souther VA constituencies that also have issues with global warming, evolution and other science facts.

Wrong again. You'll find the increase in poverty, unemployment, debt, goes to Great Recession caused by the 2000-2008 revival of Reaganomics, massive deficits from oil wars and Wall Street run amok from lack of government oversight.

The tax on high mileage cars is pure right wing ideology that denies global warming, evolution and all manner of scientific and technical facts.

 

Your insulting, trollish response turns your argument into a fallacy, but I'll play for a little while.

There is a good portion of Prius owners who don't live in nova, who reside in the metro richmond area and elsewhere.

Global warming is far from science fact:

MUST READ: John O'Sullivan: Fifty IPCC Experts Expose Washington Post Global Warming Lies | Climate Realists

1. Dr Robert Balling: "The IPCC notes that "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." (This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers).

2. Dr. Lucka Bogataj: "Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don't cause global temperatures to rise.... temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed."

3. Dr John Christy: "Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report."

4. Dr Rosa Compagnucci: "Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate."

5. Dr Richard Courtney: "The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong."

6. Dr Judith Curry: "I'm not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don't have confidence in the process."

7. Dr Robert Davis: "Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers."

8. Dr Willem de Lange: "In 1996, the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3,000 "scientists" who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate. I didn't. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities."

9. Dr Chris de Freitas: "Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the longstanding claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of 'argument from ignorance' and predictions of computer models."

10. Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: "Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it."

11. Dr Peter Dietze: "Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake."

12. Dr John Everett: "It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios."

13. Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: "The IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change."

14. Dr Lee Gerhard: "I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) concept until the furor started after [NASA's James] Hansen's wild claims in the late 1980's. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting at first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false."

15. Dr Indur Goklany: "Climate change is unlikely to be the world's most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk."

16. Dr Vincent Gray: "The (IPCC) climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies."

17. Dr Kenneth Green: "We can expect the climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority."

18. Dr Mike Hulme: "Claims such as '2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous ... The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was "only a few dozen."

19. Dr Kiminori Itoh: "There are many factors which cause climate change. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful. When people know what the truth is they will feel deceived by science and scientists."

20. Dr Yuri Izrael: "There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate."

21. Dr Steven Japar: "Temperature measurements show that the climate model-predicted mid-troposphere hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them."

22. Dr Georg Kaser: "This number (of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC) is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude ... It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,"

23. Dr Aynsley Kellow: "I'm not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be."

24. Dr Madhav Khandekar: "I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence."

25. Dr Hans Labohm: "The alarmist passages in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring."

26. Dr. Andrew Lacis: "There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department."

27. Dr Chris Landsea: "I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."

28. Dr Richard Lindzen: "The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance."

29. Dr Harry Lins: "Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. The case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated."

30. Dr Philip Lloyd: "I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said."

31. Dr Martin Manning: "Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors."

32. Stephen McIntyre: "The many references in the popular media to a "consensus of thousands of scientists" are both a great exaggeration and also misleading."

33. Dr Patrick Michaels: "The rates of warming, on multiple time scales have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled."

34. Dr Nils-Axel Morner: "If you go around the globe, you find no sea level rise anywhere."

35. Dr Johannes Oerlemans: "The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine."

36. Dr Roger Pielke: "All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not as a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system."

37. Dr Jan Pretel: "It's nonsense to drastically reduce emissions ... predicting about the distant future-100 years can't be predicted due to uncertainties."

38. Dr Paul Reiter: "As far as the science being 'settled,' I think that is an obscenity. The fact is the science is being distorted by people who are not scientists."

39. Dr Murray Salby: "I have an involuntary gag reflex whenever someone says the "science is settled. Anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic is in fantasia."

40. Dr Tom Segalstad: "The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data."

41. Dr Fred Singer: "Isn't it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites--probably because the data show a (slight) cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction to the calculations from climate models?"

42. Dr Hajo Smit: "There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change."

43. Dr Roy Spencer: "The IPCC is not a scientific organization and was formed to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Claims of human-cause global warming are only a means to that goal."

44. Dr Richard Tol: "The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices."

45. Dr Tom Tripp: "There is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made."

46. Dr Robert Watson: "The (IPCC) mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened."

47. Dr Gerd-Rainer Weber: "Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis."

48. Dr David Wojick: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."

49. Dr Miklos Zagoni: "I am positively convinced that the anthropogenic global warming theory is wrong."

50. Dr. Eduardo Zorita: "Editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. By writing these lines... a few of my future studies will not see the light of publication."

Lets not forget who actually started us on the path to financial ruin.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending - New York Times

Clinton’s no liberal hero - Salon.com

The top is where you want to be.

 

But most do which meant the facts contradicted your claim it was Northern VA, the Democratic base, that was pushing for tax on Prius.

Which proves my second point of fact that the tax on high mileage cars is rooted in the faith based climate science deniers and evolution science deniers.

Ignorance and anti-American policies are the main motivators for those who tax high mileage cars the solution to US national security, economic and environmental problems.

 

Have we lost sight on this thread (assuming taxes are allocated for their intended purpose) that roads must be paid for? Would it be more fair to have a lower flat tax per gallon of gas, then tax all drivers based on the mileage they drive? On a per mile basis, hybrids wear out our roads the same as non-hybrids, so why should we be exempt from paying our fair share? Is there a better solution? Probably, but going to a pure per-mile tax system will be disliked by everyone, so the next best thing is to slap a small tax on hybrids. I don't see the "hybrid car tax" as a penalty against high mileage vehicles, but as a way for hybrid owners to pay more of their fair share of road maintenance. The problem I see down the road is that non-hybrid cars are getting more efficient with each passing year and soon we'll have non-hybrid cars approaching 40 mpg combined EPA - shouldn't they be taxed additionally as well?

 

^^^
Yes, roads must be paid for. The issue is that per-mile taxes and even worse, hybrid taxes discourage people from the greater good of using less of non-renewable resource, most of which resides in volatile regions of the world and where some of that $ ends up in the hands of unfriendly governments and terrorists. This is besides the environmental damage caused by its use, transport, accidents, etc. (Let's assume AGW is bogus and out of the equation since that seems to be a matter of controversy, for some.)

This is why it's better to raise the gas tax for everyone instead, if funds are "insufficient" "due to" hybrids or the trend towards more efficient vehicles.

 

Taxing the Prius is akin to the Window Tax.

Eventually it will be the Gov that kills the EV and Hybrid Car as people avoid the tax.

I'm sure consumers on the dealer lots will start to think Hybrid cost more than ICE car and I have to pay a registration tax. I'll buy the ICE.


Window tax - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia