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Comment by supergauntlet | Hacker News Reader

Gas taxes disproportionately affect the poor though. I agree with your premise that we have too many large vehicles and there's no good incentive to pick a vehicle that's "just" large enough for your uses (so of course everyone picks these enormous trucks and SUVs), but I just think there has to be a better way of regulating than a gas tax.

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Is a gas tax really regressive? (asking not because I don't believe it, but because I've never seen this idea stated before). I can see how it's more likely to be regressive among car-owning lower income people (who devote a larger portion of their income to gas, and would therefore be disproportionately affected).

But lower-income people are also less likely to own a car. Even among those who do, they're more likely to moderate their gas usage, more likely to find ways to carpool, and more likely to find the fuel savings of a smaller car to be compelling.

Outside of large cities with functional mass transit, most low income people do own (or finance) cars. Otherwise they would be no-income. You can find a lot of low end job listings that say “reliable transportation” and they don’t mean a bus ride sandwiched between two several-mile hikes. Their cars will be perhaps 10-15 years old, depending on whether their state has winters or emissions laws. They can’t afford the latest fuel efficient vehicles and might be getting 18-25 miles per gallon. Fuel will be a significant fraction of their transportation expense compared to anyone with a higher income, so a fuel tax will necessarily be regressive.

Well even ignoring all that, flat tax rates are regressive. This sounds counterintuitive, but 5% of someones income is a very different thing for someone who makes 30k and someone who makes 300k. Everyone has some amount of fixed costs in common.

A "carbon tax with dividend" is the progressive version of the regressive carbon tax.

Sure. I'd also be interested in any kind of incentives for poor people to get in fuel efficient small newer cars. A carrot rather than a stick, if you will.

I keep harping on that. Raising the gas tax punishes poor and working class people for decisions they (or other people made for them) back when there wasn't any rational choice.

Consider a working stiff driving a 10 year old car. Living in a place with no good public transportation. Raising the gas tax assumes he has/had options he doesn't not in fact have. And policy changes that would give him an alternative have time lines a 100 times longer than next months rent.

Opinion: Gas taxes are based on wishful ideologically driven thinking that free markets can solve public policy failures.

OK, I'll consider that working stiff. Let's say he lives in Saskatchewan, family of 4, rural area. That means he gets a carbon tax rebate of $670 in 2019, which would cover the carbon tax for 4408 gallons of gas. The average family in Saskatchewan pays $403 in carbon taxes over the year. That working stiff may drive more than average, but his carbon footprint is unlikely to be more than average because he probably is heating a smaller house, flying less than normal and buying less stuff than rich people.

Of course this working stiff can't afford to buy a new Tesla, but in my experience poor people turn over their cars faster than the middle class. Their junker breaks down and it'll cost more to fix it than it's worth so they sell the old one to a wrecker and buy another 10 year old car. Maybe the next 10 year old car is a used Leaf? Awful range, but it gets him to work and back, and it saves a good bit of money...

If you make gas taxes revenue neutral, by redistributing the proceeds evenly, to every resident man, woman, and child, as a cheque that arrives on November 15, this would solve your objection, and have broad public support for it.

I think that's exactly what Canada's federal carbon tax is, and even so it's wildly unpopular unfortunately.

It's not 'exactly that.'

Nobody gets cheques in the mail for it. When BC introduced its RNCT, the BC Liberals[1] sent exactly one set of cheques out, once - while burying the revenue-neutral revenues in an abstract, unmeasurable corporate and income tax cut. Rob the poor to pay the rich sort of stuff.

On the bright side, it also reduced gas usage by ~20% in 10 years[2], compared to the rest of the country, which is about ~20% more of a reduction then all the useless self-congratulatory hand-wringing about the plight of the poor has ever accomplished. [3]

[1] For foreign readers - the BC Liberals are liberal-in-name only. They are the mainstream conservative party of British Columbia, and have close ties to the Federal Conservative Party of Canada.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax

[3] If we're going to put the brakes on any climate-disaster-related initiative, because someone, somewhere is going to be worse off for it, you may as well shoot me now. Someone, somewhere is always going to be worse off with every policy decision. We'll all be worse off if we keep wasting time, instead of acting.

The parent is talking about the federal carbon tax with it's "Green Action Incentive", not BC's RNCT.

Then it's a bit too early to say whether or not it's actually an unpopular, unworking policy, no?

There's a couple of confounding factors at work, here, the most important one of which is the smoke from the tyre pyre of the Federal Liberal administration.

The parent didn't say it was unworking, they said it was unpopular, which it definitely is.

You take the extra money and redistribute it. Either as a refund on your registration based on miles driven (meaning more efficient cars get more back than they spent) or as a straight up income tax credit for the poor.

If the excuse to raise the gas tax is to reduce driving, then using the money collected to reduce the pain of the gas tax is in direct conflict with the excuse in the first place and it turns into straight redistribution of wealth. Nice bit of smoke and mirrors.

If you did it as an income tax credit it would reduce driving because a lot of the poor people who would get money don't drive, and more importantly, people are much more psychologically motivated by a $100 fill-up than a year-end tax credit.

yes, a gas tax can be regressive but what's the actual effect on the less affluent, especially over time? it would likely be a short-term hit (which you could mitigate with a one-time credit) until those SUVs and trucks were traded in for safer vehicles.

the more relevant criticism, in my view, is that a gas tax would be too indirect and wouldn't induce larger vehicles to become safer (not to mention it's confusing, thus making people mad).

so then, could we construct an incentive that was proportional to a vehicle's safety record (along with a progressive punishment for the inverse)? as another commenter added, insurance may be the right avenue for this.

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