6 ms·
US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero
- csto12 4mo agoA deeply unserious country. What else can you say?
- quink 4mo agoThat Duffy sent this letter to the governors: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/memorandum/Freedom_to_Drive_Initiative-Signed_Letter_to_Governors-20260420.pdf https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/memorandum/Freedom_to_Drive_Initiat... Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
- corygarms 4mo agoSo to recap: we should pave the earth for gas cars, tax EVs into oblivion for the damage they do, and call it "freedom."
- cyberax 4mo ago[flagged]
- cozzyd 4mo agoHmm pretty sure this train I'm on right now is taking me home from work. Transit is such a failure that I haven't owned a car in 15 years...
- chrisco255 4mo agoThats nice but that doesnt work for vast majority of the United States. Cars are here to stay. People live in the suburbs you aren't going to mass migrate hundreds of millions of people.
- cozzyd 4mo agoBoth things can be true?
- cyberax 4mo agoLet me guess: single, no children? Or a full-time stay-at-home spouse if more than 2 children? Alternatively, not the US.
- cozzyd 4mo agoMarried with a 4-year-old, in the US (Chicago ). About to bring her to school on the bus in a bit.
- chrisco255 4mo agoThis is how Congress works, for better or worse. Bills get proposed all the time by any one of its five hundred or so members, it doesn't mean either one will pass. That's democracy.
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoI've been paying my EV tax for 1.5 years now in NZ. It's about 2x more than hybrid cars pay thru tax. Just dropped $800 for the next 10k km. Also some sort of registration rebate has been removed so another $100 per year.
- ck2 4mo agoI mean we're dealing with an administration that paid off windfarms billions to NOT build but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war
- imglorp 4mo agoWe also subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct, and much more than that indirect (wars, pollution, warming etc). A 100% fossil tax is what we need to kick that habit.
- Jblx2 4mo ago>subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct I would like to see a source for that. Usually this is from someone who thinks corporate taxes should be on gross revenue instead of profit.
- orwin 4mo agoI think corporations should pay import taxes on services, that would fix a lot of tax dodging
- imglorp 4mo agohttps://fossilfuelsubsidytracker.org https://fossilfuelsubsidytracker.org Globally it was 1.6 T in 2022, direct. For what they call implicit subsidies, IMF thinks it was $6.7T in 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2025/12/20/underpriced-and-overused-fossil-fuel-subsidies-data-2025-update-572729 https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2025/12/20/und...
- Jblx2 4mo agoLooks like $6.46 per person in the U.S. >The scope of the OECD Inventory is therefore broader than conventional conceptions of “subsidy”. https://fossilfuelsubsidytracker.org/methodology/ https://fossilfuelsubsidytracker.org/methodology/ ...so I guess we should be ganging up on the Netherlands ($1,760 per capita) and Sweden ($924 per person).
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoGas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoThe electorate is not so stupid that "it turns out people really don't want what I'm peddling so I'm just gonna reframe it and those idiots will be none the wiser" is likely to work. Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.
- javascriptfan69 4mo ago>The electorate is not so stupid.. Respectfully, they are.
- usefulcat 4mo agoYou mean the same electorate that elected a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes, and then proceeded to do exactly that?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy Tougher to notice. And you can pitch it as a windfall tax.
- HWR_14 4mo ago> If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still. The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1]. [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ Art. I § 9
- hamdingers 4mo ago$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive? This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee. But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
- legitster 4mo agoGas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason). A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.
- philipkglass 4mo agoCouldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.
- legitster 4mo agoIndividuals would have to track miles out of state or off of public roads. It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.
- philipkglass 4mo agoNo, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions. The state where the car is registered collects the tax for every mile driven. It would lead to some mistakes in the small scale (what if I live in northern Oregon but do most of my driving in southern Washington, or vice versa?) but it seems like a serviceable alternative for the macro-scale problem of how states can replace the funding from gas taxes. And it does so without the expense or privacy invasions of schemes like automatic plate tracking or in-car GPS tracking.
- cory_garms 4mo ago[flagged]
- corygarms 4mo ago[flagged]
- nyxtom 4mo agoI'm getting really tired of every single attempt to be taxed into oblivion. Just leave me the hell alone
- frankbreetz 4mo agoYou would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?
- 6r8lt7kt6ikir6 4mo ago"If you don't like it, why don't you leave the country?" - common denominator who thinks he is not a pig.
- frankbreetz 4mo agoMore like if you use services that cost money, why would you expect them for free?
- nayuki 4mo agoWhen it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver. Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
- quickthrowman 4mo ago> but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. The rest of society also pays for the transportation costs of consumer goods, which include diesel and gas taxes which end up funding roads. Every time you buy something that rode on a truck, a fraction of the price you pay is road taxes.
- jaredwiener 4mo agoZeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense. Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going. That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
- turtlebits 4mo agoStates already charge EV registration fees for lost gas tax revenue.
- stavros 4mo agoAre EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?
- bediger4000 4mo agoNo, but the oil companies don't want EVs, so Republicans don't want EVs.
- seanmcdirmid 4mo agoYes, and they have been for a few years now. I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026. Maybe Alaska?
- stavros 4mo ago> Are EVs that widespread in the US already > Yes, and they have been for a few years now. Apparently they're 1.9% of all vehicles currently on the road, do you consider that to be "that widespread"? I was aiming for 51%. > I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026 That doesn't mean EVs are widespread, it just means states want to favor ICEs more than EVs.
- ccamrobertson 4mo agoIt's difficult to take articles like this seriously when they use hyperbole like "...the most evil industry the planet has ever seen [oil]", never mind things like chattel slavery. I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
- legitster 4mo agoI want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second: - The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades. - The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew). - Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general. - Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain. - As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway. There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.
- tw04 4mo ago> The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew). “Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question. I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
- legitster 4mo ago> I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit. I mean, this is more or less how it already works with all the federal department funding. The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.
- 4mo ago
- sleepyguy 4mo agoExpect more and more attacks on anything that challenges the status quo. Great article from the Guardian. The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly >Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/17/america-china-energy-oil-renewables https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
- m463 4mo agotax what you want less of... (wonder where the bill really originates from?)
- daft_pink 4mo agoI think the biggest problem is that EVs and hybrids travel less total miles on the road due to their nature, so it should be an odometer based price based on actual usage not a punitive high dollar amount compared to a gas vehicle.
- dzhiurgis 4mo ago> travel less total miles on the road due to their nature Kinda opposite really. If I wasn't driving much I'd get a big ass gas guzzler for cheap rather than drop 50k on an EV. Driving long legs in a gas car is pain in the ass too, IDK how people do it.
- neogodless 4mo agohttps://its.ucdavis.edu/blog/no-electric-vehicles-arent-driven-less-gas-cars https://its.ucdavis.edu/blog/no-electric-vehicles-arent-driv... This 5 year old study suggests that some early reports (on early EVs) lead us to believe that it was a universal truth. After all, the early BMW i3 and Nissan Leaf only had ~50-75 mile range. But even as far back as 2019, that had changed, and electric cars were being driven as much, and often more, than their gasoline equivalents. See also https://evpowered.co.uk/news/evs-now-clocking-up-more-miles-per-year-than-petrol-cars/ https://evpowered.co.uk/news/evs-now-clocking-up-more-miles-...
- neogodless 4mo agoAverage car gets 24.4 mpg, while federal gas tax is currently $0.183 / gallon. US drivers average 13,476 miles (across gender / age groups). So currently gas tax is ~$101.07 (for "cars", more for light trucks.) As someone who drives 5000-6000 miles a year in an EV, I don't love $130 flat rate, but it's not far enough from the average gas tax to be wildly upsetting to me. In my state, though, I'm already paying $250 / year, or about $0.04/mile. Gas tax here is $0.576/gallon which comes out to ~$318.12 annually, or $0.024 / mile for an "average" gas driver (using figures above). If I drove a more average amount, it would be inline. As others have discussed, the trade-off of a flat fee is not having to devise ways to grant your exact miles driven data to the government, and the taxes are close enough to the gas taxes that I'm not going to be up in arms about it. I save way more than that having virtually no powertrain maintenance. (My state inspection was 15 minutes and $40. Basically they said, yup, it has tires.) https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310 https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310 https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dmv/vehicle-services/road-user-charge https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dmv/vehicle-services/road-user-c... https://www.pa.gov/agencies/revenue/resources/tax-rates/motor-fuel-tax-rates#accordion-416661d3e1-item-60079e4470 https://www.pa.gov/agencies/revenue/resources/tax-rates/moto...