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Comment by hexo | Hacker News Reader

Car owners are already way too over-charged with various taxes. At least here, in our country.

Auto infrastructure takes up 52% of cities like Houston.

If autos were taxed their fair share - they should be taxed more than Real Estate - yet property taxes are a much larger portion of municipal revenues...

Gas taxes in most states have a very small percentage (or none) of municipal budgets (52% of the city that is roads and parking lots).

Gas taxes mainly pay for state routes (state level) and highways (federal level). This is a VERY small percentage of the total road network.

Property taxes also go to infrastructure to access the property.

With modern zoning laws, that means car infrastructure.

You'll need to elaborate so I can refute that point by point.

I want that written on a t-shirt.

Car owners are subsidized more by the state than pretty much any other group. Direct road construction and maintenance, public construction of parking spaces, construction and zoning laws requiring car infrastructure and parking, petroleum subsidies, petroleum transport infrastructure, anti-competitive policy blocking other forms of transportation, shields from liability for large-scale death (for both drivers/owners and manufacturers) and local pollution, etc. etc.

The negative externalities from driving far outweigh what automobile drivers directly pay in cash.

Automobiles clearly also provide great benefits. But they are a great example of a system with mostly personal/private gains based on mostly public/socialized costs.

What makes you think that? Are the fees excessive for the amount of infrastructure they require and negative externalities they cause?

Yes, the fees are way too excessive. Most of them also disappear no one knows where.

The fact that they are basically taxes not tied to income is pretty annoying. If you're barely scraping by, the state should not be taxing you as heavily on a gallon of gasoline as a doctor that barely blinks as they fill up their Sclass.

The way to fix this is to give extra cash directly to everyone without strings and then let people make rational choices about how to spend it, not artificially reduce the price of activities which are already priced far below their costs.

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