alt Hacker NewsI want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second:
- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.
- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.
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- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage
I don't want to set the author's disdain aside at all. It's 100% justified.
This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.
Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.
The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.
> The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
“Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.