I worked at a liquor store when I was 21 and lived in a midwestern bible-belt state. We had flyers at the counter educating customers to vote against a raise of sin-taxes (alcohol, tobacco, possibly adult material, I don't recall) to offset a budget deficit (specifically upkeep of roads and highways).
It's not right for my vices to pay for your infrastructure. Tax tobacco to fund cancer research. Tax alcohol to advance treatment of liver disease. Tax porn to fund, I dunno, therapy for people who can't view it in moderation.
On a similar note, I do NOT have a problem with paying for schools even though I don't have kids. It raises property values and that's a benefit to me and everyone in the district. Plus, educating young people benefits society as a whole. I'm not some "don't tax me" guy because taxes are good. They just should be limited and targeted and not levied unfairly against those with bad habits for the benefit / relief of all.
That said, I apologize for quitting drinking. Research into treating cirrhosis of the liver will have to take a moderate hit and that's my fault. /s but only sorta
Fuel taxes should be raised to pay for road infrastructure. Align the incentives so that people can make good decisions about whether to drive or not. And shippers can make better decisions about whether to ship via rail, ship, or truck.
I don't see a fuel tax being a vice tax since I must drive to work and the stores. I want to drive as little as possible.
Use-taxes are just to push from the collective to the average person. Instead of having companies like Amazon fit the bill for all the road damage they produce, from their delivers to their supply chains, they push it others. Rather have those companies pay their fare share and reduce the cost of fuel for the average person.
Politics play a big role in alternative transportation set backs. I would travel more if there were bullet trains between large cities. Don't like driving nor flying nor bus. There is push against alternative transportation by both the car industry and oil industry. Political donations by these help remove the chance of high-speed rail. Even though it would improve national security and service economy.
EVs are breaking this funding model.
I'd suggest curbside parking should be charged everywhere. Free omnipresent parking is what has hollowed out American cities. Car storage is an awful use of public space.
Not yet. The biggest road destroyers are heavy vehicles which are all still fossil fuel powered.
The only part of the problem broken is that EV owners are no longer subsidizing the damage done by walmart to a road.
Raising fuel taxes is a win-win for everyone. It makes EVs more attractive and shipping garbage more expensive. It's an effective way to directly impact CO2 emissions.
You are woefully incorrect. in most places EV's road taxes are massively disproportionate to the amount of road tax an ICE vehicle would pay.
Here in Texas, I would ordinarily pay about $30/year in road taxes on gasoline driving a 30mpg vehicle 12,000/mi anually.
But I have an EV instead so instead I pay:
$500 in surcharge for the first year of registration and $200 surcharge for every year thereafter.
Oh whoops I misspoke; I actually have 3 EVs so despite being one person, I pay approximately 25x more road tax than the average driver here.
IMO money is fungible and specifically locking in a tax to fund a specific thing seems like a good way to make the funding available for that thing volatile unless it’s so expensive that no matter what the tax pulls in it will never be enough. I doubt people would actually adjust their fuel consumption to the ideal balance between personal utility and road infrastructure funding.
It's very easy to stop funding X from the general fund and using the specific allocated money, so the overall spend on X doesn't increase at all, it's just the money now comes from the special tax, instead of the general fund.
The general fund money can then be spent on whatever again, say the mayor's sin habit ;)
> Fuel taxes should be raised to pay for road infrastructure.
Unfortunately there's a looming issue there: "Hydrocarbons used" stops being a valid proxy for "how much you use the road" as more cars are hybrids or all-electric.
That said, those taxes did have a nice property of being imprecise enough that individual privacy was protected. I often point out to certain "only charge me for the things I actually use" folks that actually getting their wish would also give the government intimate knowledge of their movements and habits.
Somewhere in the middle might be a tax based on periodic odometer readings.
tax porn to fund the recovery of victims of the sex industry
Isnt the point of "sin taxes" to offset externalities? If the externalities decrease then so should the tax. If governments are looking for a steady source of income then "sin taxing" seems like the wrong approach.
I think a common argument is that it is to offset externalities but in reality I've never seen a sin tax that is based on the cost of the externality.
The tax on cigarettes is not pegged to the expenditures on COPD and other diseases and etc.
Afaik, all sin taxes go into the general coffers so they can't really be based on externalities. Plus the fuel tax doesn't even pay enough for road repair never mind any externalities (especially considering there's often no sales tax on fuel).
Nope, not the only point. Just adding some cost / friction to the "sin" is a goal.
I'm always surprised at how "little" the use of the taxes for marijuana have made an impact. Either it's being grossly managed, or there's just not as much sales from mary jane as I would have expected.
As an Oregonian, I wish I could see the benefits of it locally. We have at least a half dozen weed shops in my town, vastly outnumbering any other category of business, and yet my kids literally couldn't go to school one day last week because the district "doesn't have enough money to staff the buildings."
I know it's a bit of an unfair complaint, but these are the things I start wondering about when we can't even keep our schools open. Where is the money going?
You can look up the state budget here: https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/lfo/Pages/Publications.asp...
Your local municipality probably has some kind of budget transparency thing that you can look at and by comparing YoY expenditures you should be able to sus out where the money is going and where its coming from. Would be cool to have some kind of queryable dataset for this process tho
As a Washingtonian - you guys just don't have that much money. Your income taxes are low.
Oregon weed tax revenue is mostly earmarked for addiction support spending, isn't it?
Maybe there isn't that much money in it? The stuff does "grow on trees" after all.
There might be lots of weed stores for the same reason antique stores and cigarette shops proliferate - they're cheap to set up.
You can view all of Washington's weed revenue https://502data.com/ $2,600,919,507 seems like a lil bit of money in tax revenue
sadly it looks like most of the current data went behind a pay wall
The secretary of state also publishes this data.
What scale of impact do you expect?
It's a big enough new industry that the revenues are non-trivial, but there's a lot of industry and lot of tax revenue out there already. It's not like a bunch of stoners are going to be able to provide the budget for a university system or rail network from a modest tax on their hobby.
Tax social media platforms' advertising money. Their current incentives of maximizing engagement is fucking everyone especially the youth.
pity them without undrestanding the two thousand year old idea of "forgiveness from sin"
pity even more them who really believe the government is funded through taxes, not through credit
Reminds me of "Japan urges its young people to drink more to boost economy" (two years ago):
Sin? In this economy?! /S
I disagree with the conclusions, it's not the sin that goes away it's really the opportunities to sin.