Except for the untold millions who are barely scraping by after the pandemic who have no leeway in their budget for an auto tax increase.
Basically the idea is we then take the tax income raised by a societally harmful activity (like driving) and redistribute it to individuals like the ones who are scraping by so that tax is revenue neutral.
Best to keep in mind both sides of the equation, because we can only eat one of these things.
Americans can buy food from anywhere. There's an oversupply that is difficult to deal with because the farming industrial complex constantly improves yields. We already get food from Mexico, south america, Canada, fish from the ocean all over. We stupidly subsidize ethanol, we should get rid of that. We need to keep some food production going, both for national security but also because the rural areas are already decimated with job loss and lack of opportunities for people. Every town is full of closed shops and the nearby Walmart supplanted all local things, except maybe a bar.
My family has farms in the south and midwest, I want to support farming and those farmers. The US govt pays us not to plant part of our crop. And they also have price supports on crops which basically sets the price. Of course we all benefit from cheap food. Much of the profit is gone from farming. Most young people take outside jobs because you can't make a living unless you have very large mass scale (this is not exactly a new discovery).
My dad lives in a big city in Texas and inherited his mom's farm. Someone else farms it, he doesn't have anything to do with it. 30 years ago there were some salt of the earth farmers but they all sadly died, at least in my family.
In Washington state they have a report from the legislature that has spending in each county compared to tax revenues. This is very sensitive because of course Seattle money goes out to the whole state. There's a second version of that report that tries to compute the economic benefit of the rural areas, separately from the actual tax revenues, I'm sure this was created to lessen the sting.
I want to keep our economy and the people in it living. But we need to have a shared reality.
One county, Lake County, had the good manners to cancel a planned vote of secession in late 2015 after the rest of the state paid to put out an enormous wildfire there.
rural folk think the same way of Urbanites as you think of them. they think everyone should get out of the cities and stop being a polluting leech who is detached from the natural state of humans living in equillibrium with nature.
Now, also look back a century. Rural life existed - not exactly the same but also with improvements like healthier communities because people bought locally rather than driving 2 hours to Walmart or Costco. Raising the price of gas would benefit all of businesses which have been out priced by companies who don’t have to pay for externalities. Sharing a ride might seem like a good trade in comparison to learning that your staple crop no longer grows in your region or that the hundred year flood/fire is now a decadal experience.
Also, remember that this isn’t a ban on cars. It’s a financial cue pushing people to drive less, combine trips, buy the vehicle with the specs they actually need rather than the heavily-marketed guzzler, etc. People like having way more horsepower than they need but nobody is really inconvenienced without it.
That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for. But if you’re going to squeeze people out of cars, you should probably have a solid plan to deal with the outcome.
>That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for.
My point is direct economic recovery of those externalities is going to be largely regressive, and that the idea of that investing in bicycles and buses is a suitable replacement is incomplete...particularly in non-metro regions.
This may be true in some areas, but not most.
The problem is that we spent most of the 20th century designing the country around cars, and especially discouraging transit as something generally for poor/brown people. Even in cities which have things like subways, urban design almost always massively prioritized suburban commuters over transit users. People make horrible financial decisions because having a big, late model vehicle is such a social status signal.
The problem is changing that puts us in a prisoner’s dilemma: on an individual level in much of the country it’s best to keep piling your money into a depreciating mostly-idle asset because you need a critical mass of riders for transit to be cost effective. Using things like higher gas taxes to pay for things like road maintenance and pollution remediation can work well but people who are used to being subsidized will complain bitterly as soon as you ask them to pay the true cost for what they use.