I think increasing the payroll tax is a mistake. People who don’t own a car should actually be rewarded because they pollute far less, they don’t disable workers, they don’t require traffic police, they don’t emit CO2…
I would replace the payroll tax with a weight tax on huge SUVs.
How about a surcharge on giant fuck-off pickup trucks? $5000 for plates.
While I understand they’re paranoid about losing the gas tax when we transition to EVs, it really grinds my gears that I’ve never once seen one of these proposals to fairly tax all vehicles by means other than gas tax. EVs should not be treated as special and certainly shouldn’t be discouraged with higher taxes
It should be based off the vehicle weight. if the premise is that the tax pays for road repairs, ev or gas doesn’t matter, heavier vehicles do more road damage.
“per-mile charge for electric vehicles” means GPS/license plate tracking of all cars. That’s the only way to determine the number of miles driven in state. Of course they could simply charge you for all miles if your car is registered in Oregon but then cars not registered in Oregon wouldn’t pay anything even if they drove exclusively in Oregon.
That’s not necessarily true. In the UK we have a yearly roadworthiness test for almost all vehicles called and MoT test. Part of this process is recording the mileage of the vehicle. There’s no need to GPS track every vehicle to get their mileage
Many US states also have annual inspections, although I don’t know about Oregon. They could uneasily record annual Miles here, although the objection is that is overall miles, not miles on state roads, and it only works for cars registered in the state.
While a small number of people may cheat by driving out of state cars, I think this is highly discouraged by insurance civerage
EVs should be exempt from emissions test
Another state actively disincentivising electric vehicle adoption by charging extra. It is an incredibly stupid policy. All else being equal, electric cars are less bad than gas cars.
Motor vehicles should be taxed based on mileage and weight. If drivers can save money on their taxes by driving a car that is less bad for the environment, that a good thing, and a sign of effective policy.
Motor vehicles should be taxed based on mileage and weight.
Aye, and make the weight x mileage tax proportional to the amount of wear put on the roads due to said weight. My little scooter should only cost 1/1000 of the freaking big rigs.
Big rigs are commercial vehicles. Driving is the work, not the commute. So they are wearing down the roads 8 hours a day, instead of the hour or so of a passenger car.
Long haul trucking only exists because of massive subsidies. Truck registration, tolls, and all other fees should be thousands of times higher than small cars, to be fair and equitable.
Because they’re not buying gas, the state is trying to reclaim some of that money.
I understand this but, I don’t understand why there is two fees for it. They have a 30$ electric vehicle fee on registration ontop of the existing cost, and then also plan to have an electric charge per mile fee later on. Like at that point remove or alter the 30$ charge to be all vehicles. They are trying to double dip.
If they’re not buying gas they should not be paying gas taxes. That’s the point. Reducing gas consumption is a good thing.
My understanding is that taxing gas is a decent proxy for taxing things like road wear or the need for road construction. So if 300 SUVs roll over a crack and turn it into a pothole, the funds for fixing that pothole come from the money they pay into tax at the gas station.
Since EVs skip that step, the tax is meant to represent that road wear, without the infrastructure or wars in the Middle East that goes into delivering gas.
A better way of taxing would be without a proxy. Road wear is proportional to vehicle weight and miles driven. That’s why I’m advocating for that.
Taxes are an incentive. Under my proposal being better saves money. Not buying gas lowers your tax. Driving less lowers your tax. Driving a lighter vehicle lowers your tax.
Being bad and driving a heavy, gas powered, car excessive distances becomes unaffordable. As it should.
Not to mention EVs can weight up to 500lbs more than a standard car with a full tank due to the batteries.
It should be noted that this is important because it means that EVs degrade infrastructure more than a lighter ICE. So while they don’t fuck up the environment from emissions as much, they cost more in repairs to roads and bridges and such without contributing to those funds through the gas tax.
No, this is BS. Type of vehicle matters much more than whether it’s an EV or not. My EV is lighter than the thousands of pickups I see every day so it’s unreasonable to make the argument that EVs are heavier.
Plus it’s specious to argue how much more damage an EV does to the road at something like +20% weight when trucks cause thousands of times the damage. Unless that EV is adding 40 tons, it’s effectively the same as any other car: orders of magnitude more than bicycles and orders of magnitude less than trucks
Just go by weight. It doesn’t matter where that weight is from or what technology makes up that weight
Right but ICE vehicles pay for every mile the use the roads through gas taxes. EVs do not
Even that’s not fair since efficiency isn’t the same thing as road usage. And one of the reasons gas taxes cover so little of the cost of roads is efficiency improvements over the last few decades.
Even before you take EVs into account, taxing by weight and mileage is more fair.
Then when you do take EVs into account, how do you adjust for usage, for road damage, and for your choice of vehicles? Is it fair to charge the same for a monstrous Hummer EV as for a Peugeot city car? Is it fair to pay the same for your Tesla driving 10k/year as for an ICE BMW of the same weight driving 30k/year? Taxing by weight and mileage is more fair for everyone
Equinox EV vs ICE is about 1,500 lbs heavier or 33%.
Trying to find actual twins with actual data ….
First result is Hyundai Kona, with listed curb weight EV is 550 pounds heavier
I doubt it. I see the same thing in ai search results but on reading it, it actually says EV weight not posted and it estimates 1,500 pounds.
I tried looking up the vehicle and sure enough, weight not listed.
But the reason I doubt that estimate is a Tesla battery weighs about 1,200 pounds depending on model, and EVs typically save some of that weight from the engine and transmission.
I know an Equinox EV isn’t very efficient but I have a hard time believing that it adds more weight than an entire Tesla battery pack, saving nothing by removing engine and transmission …. Unless it’s not at all the same vehicle
CarAndDriver
1.5L 3452 lb
EV 4923 lb
That’s insane. Either Chevy is really shitty at building EVs or those are two very different vehicles with the same name
Still don’t think that’s representative
seems like they already penalize EVs more. 500 gallons per year is an extra $30. $230 total. EV increases are $72 + a future mileage charge. There’s already $196/year extra EV charge. Close to existing gas tax on 500 gallons ($200).
Once again Oregon refuses to tax businesses or meaningfully shift the burden onto the heavy trucking industries which are demonstrated to cause considerably more damage to roads per mile than passenger cars.
Blue state indeed…
Their implementation of tolling was backassward and regressive: fine those forced to commute and no planned public transportation and infrastructure improvmeents to support moving away from car economy.
That said, removing reference to tolling? Why? The shit implementation was the problem, not because most people think those who use something should pay for it.
Such a goddamn money pit and killing ourselves and the planet in the meantime.
IMO Kotek has been mostly a lame duck, but these proposals aren’t bad. I would invert the 50-30-20 revenue split between state, county, and city because it’s almost always cities or counties that are creating and maintaining bike and transit infrastructure, while today the state’s largest initiatives are still highway expansions. Highways are so very money-hungry.
I don’t like that they are planning to have both a electric vehicle fee and a per miles charge fee later on. Like it should be one or the other, not both. Otherwise they just need to make the 30$ fee for all vehicles.
Yeah adding a $30 fee specifically to electrics seems asinine, to the point that I’m hoping that is a misunderstanding on the part of the reporter. I don’t mind new fees, but new fees added to electrics that don’t get added to combustions seems regressive.
As for the per-mile charge, I like that and think it should apply to all vehicles. Flat fees don’t sufficiently or accurately compensate for road use, but a mileage charge does. People who are on the road all day should be paying more than people who only drive to get groceries, even if it’s for their job, because they put equivalently more wear on the system.
It’s disappointing that this funding is coming from regressive sources (gas tax, registration fees, payroll taxes) rather than from the state income tax, since I doubt most working poor in Oregon have the luxury of choosing a car-free work situation (can’t work near public transit or can’t live near public transit or both or perhaps it is possible but the commute is not useful for shift work). But at least they didn’t have to cut funding for other state services I guess?
The greatest trick ever pulled by oil industry PR was to convince leftists that the gas tax is regressive.
Indeed, if we want to call the gas tax regressive, then by that standard, the need to own a car to get anywhere is horribly regressive. If we’re actually concerned about low-income people, we should be worrying about how much they’re forced to pay for the gas itself, not the tax on it.
A gas tax makes sense because it directly pressures consumer behavior towards using less gas and producing less emissions, but it’s still technically regressive because poor people are more obligated to drive and gas costs are a larger proportion of their budget. The way to make it not regressive would be to redistribute the revenue.
Technically (as in, as a term of art), it is not regressive. Rather, the gas tax is a flat tax. A regressive tax is one whereby the tax rate decreases as the taxed amount increases. A flat tax is one whereby the tax rate remains the same regardless of the taxed amount.
poor people are more obligated to drive and gas costs are a larger proportion of their budget.
Sorry, but unless you are disabled…nobody is obligated to drive.
And in any case, USDOT statistics show wealthy and poor people have very similar cost burden (as percent of household budget) when it comes to gas costs. That is because income strongly correlates with vehicles miles driven; i.e. the wealthier you are the more you drive. That trend is seen in both rural and urban areas.
Sorry, but unless you are disabled…nobody is obligated to drive.
Now hold up.
I’ve had jobs I literally could not get to without driving. As in, public transit did not go from walking distance of where I was to walking distance of where my job was. At all.
I’ve lived in places without grocery stores within walking distance. Without hospitals, dentists, without pretty much anything but a shitty strip mall within walking distance because suburbia sucks.
Look, there are whole suburbs in the United States that open directly into highways. If you try to walk to or from those suburbs you will be arrested because it is illegal to walk on highways. Let me emphasize that one more time: in some places in the US you cannot legally leave your neighborhood without a car.
You can say these aren’t obligations - people can just move or quit their job. But then you’re circling back to the regressive policy issue, because it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re poor.
And “unless you’re disabled”? One in four adults in the US is disabled. And that will inevitably include you if you live long enough to experience the side effects of old age. Yeah, not all disabilities impact one’s ability to walk or take public transit, bet’s not write off disability with an “unless”.
Sorry, but unless you are disabled…nobody is obligated to drive.
There are degrees of obligation. The amount poor people would have to sacrifice in order to not drive is more. That’s how ‘regressiveness’ works.
USDOT statistics show wealthy and poor people have very similar cost burden (as percent of household budget) when it comes to gas costs
This is hard to believe because there is a maximum anyone could reasonably drive, a higher end income would dwarf the cost of that, there is a tradeoff between housing costs and commute distance (best way to avoid driving is living in an expensive city), genuinely wealthy people don’t have to commute anyway, etc. could you link the source on this?
There is tons of stats at data.bts.gov, BLS, and Federal reserve FRED system. Image above is from https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/ida7-k95k/
Basically, what we find is that wealthier people have bigger carbon footprint. They drive more miles, own more and bigger cars. They also fly more miles. What you are calling “degrees of obligation” is nothing more than a lifestyle choice. The suburbanite driving 50 miles a day in a BMW SUV is the one being impacted here, not the low-income worker taking the bus or driving an old Corolla.
Also note that driving is highly subsidized, and if the gas tax isn’t raised to cover those costs then that money still has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is other government programs, which low-income are much more highly dependent on.
Transportation spending isn’t just gas costs, I bet a lot of this is accounted for by how much more you can spend on newer, fancier cars, or even air travel.
Also note that driving is highly subsidized, and if the gas tax isn’t raised to cover those costs then that money still has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is other government programs, which low-income are much more highly dependent on.
Sure, I agree, again, I’m not arguing against a gas tax, I’m in favor of it because it’s necessary, just saying that it should be acknowledged that it disproportionately affects the poor and that fact should be addressed in its implementation.
These taxes are also regressive because the cost of shipping goods is likely to be passed along onto the consumer too
It’s super regressive. They should tie all of these to means.
I disagree, the climate isnt affected less if a poorer person emits a kilo of co2 than if musk does. It is regressive but it is essential to motivate people to move away from fossil fuels. The solution is to make up for it progressive measures elsewhere (e.g. tilting income and capital taxes to have a heavier burden on the rich).
That’s a really good point, you don’t have to solve everything in one bill. Since we don’t and haven’t though, it makes the approach of fighting for every inch on every bill the default since there is no trust anyone will fix the actually simple but hard pieces.
One thing id recommend is factoring vehicle weight into the registration, as weight is one of the big factors that contributes to roadway wear.
This has the added bonus of making Cybertruck owners cry.
As someone who lives in Oregon, and ignoring the community I’m in for a moment: Overall, good.
For context: ODOT is laying off people who maintain or improve roads due to budget constraints which will only tighten as the federal government either tightens its belt for everyone or just those for blue states. Funding has to come from somewhere, Trump isn’t going to share, and we must still have roads.
Oregon, generally, has well-maintained roads which are repaired comparatively quickly when damaged, and most road improvements in cities I see make a point to try to provide equitable and safe access ways for pedestrians and cyclists. Keeping road infrastructure is important in any future, and I’ll gladly support more road/travel improvements which reduce the incentive for cars and at worst, reduce the amount of time whatever car remain sit around idling.
EDIT: Noticed the OP edit the post, and I agree with those points as well.
I think increasing the payroll tax is a mistake
It says that it is for transit. If that includes public transit, it makes sense to me. I lack overall context on the bill/terminology/state, though.
My understanding is that it goes entirely to public transit
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the payroll tax would apply equally to all workers while funding transit, yes? In this case, it functions as an incentive for all people to take transit, since they have already paid for it.
On the whole, this looks like a great step in the right direction. Sure, it could be better - but dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Payroll taxes are notoriously regressive. The wealthy can easily dodge salary as capital gains. Even then payroll taxes usually have a cap at some value so the most you could collect from a person getting a 7 figure salary is .02% of the first 100k or whatever the cap is at.
The stiff working at autozone will pay .02% of his gross paycheck.
A fair point. If presented as a package, I would still support these propositions, though. Like, ideally I want everything funded via land value and pigouvian taxes - but I’ll take my wins where I can get them.
