And yes, Toll Cameras are the same as License Plate readers, and as such they can find exactly what car drove through their jurisdiction. While this solution does require an extensive amount of additional infrastructure, It is no more than forcing everyone to use a GPS, it is harder for people to tinker with and it is less “obviously” invasive. Granted, it does end up allowing the end user to calculate where every car went fairly well, but it would require more work than simply reading the GPS history and it would be significantly less accurate as to which neighborhood/house you went to and simply record which jurisdictions you crossed.

Practically and Economically the Tire Tax is the easiest and most efficient way to enforce a mileage tax, but this would be technically feasible.

I’ve been hopeful for years that they’d find a way to implement a VMT, find a way to get beyond this issue. But I haven’t seen anything yet… But, really, it seems like some tech wizard or group should be able to come up with something — perhaps just some way of showing when someone crosses a jurisdictional boundary. (But without tracking everywhere they go.)

Granted, I haven’t followed this topic closely in the past 5-6 years.

But if you start charging them a significant sum of money, people are going to figure out how to “roll back” their Odometer. How do we get around that without invading privacy?

For those who don’t annual self-reporting could be used with verification occurring at time of sales or when a traffic ticket was written. Or have people cruse through a check station once a year.

Miles driven per year is not a privacy issue. I think this whole worry got started when someone suggested using GPS to track car driving which could have been a privacy worry.

But, that being said, there is a substantial cost to keeping those lanes open and a substantial tax benefit for oil companies in Master Limited Partnerships. Obviously a lot of research and math to do if anything ever becomes of this, but at this point I believe acknowledging the fact that it is substantial is enough.

If the above happened, the total decrease in defense spending would probably be less than the sequester will impose when fully implemented. Granted that is still a large number.

Privacy and VMT is a funny argument, and I don’t think VMT is derailed entirely by that.

Still, the tire tax is a very interesting take. I haven’t heard that proposed anywhere else. Maybe it will come up for discussion now that you’re out here bringing it up.

A carbon/air pollution tax – This would have to be leveraged on the fuel to be practical for various reasons. We can discuss if you disagree?

An Oil tax – All of the free externalities Oil incorporates (Army to provide world stability, tax deductions through Master Limited Partnerships, etc) need to be accounted for.

A Ton*Mile tax – As wear to the road is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight, we need a way to factor this damage in. This tax would most easily be applied to tires as their wear is proportional to road wear for a given load. (Something like Tax = ((Weight)^4)*Miles*Cofactor)

The list goes on, but I believe that would cover the vast majority of it. While the article above is far from exhaustive, I believe it does raise attention to the current proposed solution and some flaws with it.

Plus it is a tax on consumption – people who accelerate fast, break hard, and regularly carry heavy loads wear down their tires faster, and of these behaviors put more wear on the road than drivers who do not exhibit these behaviors.

Just because global warming is your #1 issue doesn’t mean it should be used as the basis for all tax policy.

You want to add a carbon tax to the gasoline taxes and mandate those monies be used for solar, wind, geothermal and hydro projects depending on the region where they are collected, that’s fine (well, it’s a regressive tax, but whatever) but it is a seperate issue.