Cornyn enrages truckers by pitching 25 cent per mile tax on big rigs to finance highway work

[TexasTowelie]

WASHINGTON – For decades, taxes on gasoline and diesel financed the nation’s highways. But as vehicles get more efficient, they use less fuel. Someone has to pay to repair pavement, replace aging bridges and widen lanes.

Sen. John Cornyn floated an idea this week: a 25-cent tax on every mile driven by heavy trucks – semis, moving trucks, cement mixers and the like. That would bring in $33 billion a year, nearly as much as the fuel taxes.

“We’ve got to come up with some money from somewhere,” he said.

Truckers feel that Cornyn is throwing them under the bus.

A truck-only vehicle miles traveled tax is common in Europe, and the idea of some sort of VMT has gained traction in the United States to offset chronic shortfalls in the Highway Trust Fund. But discussion has centered on levies as low as 1 cent per mile, a small fraction of what Cornyn suggested at Tuesday’s infrastructure hearing in the Senate Finance Committee.

Read more: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/05/20/cornyn-enrages-truckers-by-pitching-25-cent-per-mile-tax-on-big-rigs-to-finance-highway-work/

[2naSalit]

1. Texas isn't that hard to avoid...

Truckers will bypass the state.

[Rstrstx]

28. I think it's supposed to be a federal tax

Honestly I’m not opposed to something like this, large trucks account for a disproportionate amount of wear on roads.

[2naSalit]

29. And they already pay for it...

twice in most states.

[WHITT]

2. Keep It Up Repubs

"We've got to come up with some money from somewhere"

Indeed.

And the Repubs keep pushing User Fees, meaning working people pay, whereas the Dems want the Rich & Corporate, who ain't paying their taxes, to cover the costs.

Ninety-One 'Fortune 500' companies paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2018. Another 56 'Fortune 500' companies paid an effective tax rate of between $0 and five percent.

Keep it up Repubs.

[Trueblue1968]

3. WE NEED TO TAX THE RICH PEOPLE ! !!!!! Like robin hood. get from the rich and give to the poor

[ExciteBike66]

4. So this republican DOES want to raise taxes on corporations?

This might push more freight onto trains, which would be detrimental to truckers. Other than that any tax increase is a wash since it would be reflected in higher truck freight prices and thus ultimately end up on the consumer.

This tax is regressive in the same way the gas tax is regressive.

[TexasTowelie]

5. Which is exactly why Cornyn proposed it. nt

[Demsrule86]

11. Just another attempt by a GOP POS to screw the middle class and the poor...it is all they know.

I am hopeful that they are doing what the last Democratic Governor of Georgia did-Roy Barnes. He pissed off most of his coalition one way or the other and in the end, they turned on him...it was said that he put voters out of his 'big tent coalition' he needed to win the governorship. God willing, the GOP is doing just that now and enough GOP types will realize they no longer represent them and vote for us.

[Hortensis]

16. All Pub tax changes shift the tax burden to the working classes

and/or eliminate services to the working classes.

Regressive as an of-course. One thing, with their consistency you never need to read the explanations of economists to understand the bottom line.

[Klaralven]

6. Trucks are responsible for most of the wear and tear on highways

4000 lb cars don't cause much flexing of bridge beams, for example. 60,000 lb semis cause much more flexing and vibrations.

The same goes for flexing asphalt and causing the need to resurface roads.

[MineralMan]

7. And Yet, They Deliver Almost Everything We Use.

It's never wise to cut off your nose to spite your face, frankly.

Cornyn is an idiot, plain and simple.

[Klaralven]

18. A mileage tax on trucks would make the competition with rail fairer

The railroads own and maintain their own rails and right of ways, including paying property taxes on them, while truckers use the public highway infrastructure, generally for only license fees and tax on diesel fuel.

A higher tax on trucking would shift more freight to rail, which is more efficient and less carbon intensive. A mileage tax would shift long-haul loads the most, while short-haul and local delivery would be affected less, since the goods aren't traveling as far.

Shifting freight from truck to electrified freight rail is much more feasible and beneficial than trying to shift passengers from airplanes to high-speed rail. Instead, more passengers should be shifted to electric buses, replacing some of the semis.

[MineralMan]

19. Everything shipped by train gets loaded into a truck for delivery

to somewhere else.

We depend on trucks to deliver almost every last thing we buy or use. Rail Freight is also useful, but does not deliver to final destinations. Trucks to that.

We ALL benefit from truck transport. Every last one of us. Our road infrastructure is something we all pay for, due to that fact. Trying to make the trucking industry pay for all of that infrastructure completely ignores our absolute need for truck transport.

Those who benefit pay. That's all of us. We all must pay for infrastructure, since we all benefit from it.

You cannot shift the cost to the trucking industry. If you do, we all will still be the ones paying for it in the end.

Look around you wherever you might be. Everything you see was on a truck at some point. Everything.

Think more broadly, please.

[Klaralven]

21. Subsidizing the costs of road transportation is one of the main causes of suburban sprawl

By making road transportation cheap to the users, though not necessarily to society as a whole, we have created an energy inefficient, carbon intensive society.

Had we pursued a more fair policy of making the users of infrastructure pay a larger share of its cost, we would have discouraged the excess consumption of highway transportation.

[Ron Green]

22. 🔺🔺This.🔺🔺

[MineralMan]

23. My point is that we all are users of that infrastructure,

so we should all pay for it, to avoid highly-regressive taxation.

You appear to be missing my point. If you buy things, you are using trucks that use the infrastructure. What about that do you not understand?

Suburban sprawl is not caused by trucking. It is caused by people wanting to live away from where they work, frankly. You cannot blame transportation of goods for that. We decided on a sprawling sort of lifestyle. The trucks brought us our goods.

And then there is the rural parts of this country. Trains no longer serve those communities, for the most part. The rail lines that used to serve those communities are gone. Trucks bring everything to them.

Again, look around you, wherever you are. Everything you see traveled the roads on a truck. Everything. We all need to pay for infrastructure, and we will, one way or another.

[Ron Green]

24. You may be missing the much larger point.

Externalized costs, lack of true-cost accounting, subsidy of hyper-consumptive choices - our built environment, especially since WW2, has grown with us into something we’ll defend, even as it kills us, by whining about high prices of things that move by truck.

[MineralMan]

33. The thing is that we cannot reverse the urban sprawl phenomenon.

The cost of doing that would overwhelm almost everything else in our economy. People live in the suburbs near and not so near to every large and mid-sized city in this country. That means that housing is there, roads are there, other infrastructure is there. There is genuinely no way to change that pattern. We have to work within it.

There is also no space in the actual cities to build replacement housing. We have truly made our beds and have to lie in them. There are no real options for anything different. The fact that transportation in privately owned vehicles is part of the cause of that urban sprawl has gone beyond our ability to correct it, quite frankly.

Taxing trucks by the mile will not correct it, either. It will only increase the cost of goods.

[Demsrule86]

9. Any truck tax would be passed on to the middle class and the poor via the goods they carry

It is a very regressive tax.

[Agschmid]

8. This is already happening in some states...

In RI large trucks are charged at open road rolling gates while cars pass through free of charge.

The RhodeWorks bridge tolling program is a unique approach to repairing bridges by tolling only specific types of tractor trailers. The tolls collected at each location in Rhode Island will go to repair the bridge or bridge group associated with that toll location.

The tolling program is part of the RhodeWorks legislation which became law in February of 2016 as a way to rebuild Rhode Island's infrastructure. RhodeWorks provides for the planning, execution, management and funding to bring the state's roads and bridges into a state of good repair by 2025. The full budget for RhodeWorks is about $4.9 billion over ten years and about one tenth of that amount will come from the tolling program. The RhodeWorks law prohibits tolls on cars and small trucks.

Tolls will be collected along six major highway corridors at twelve locations. Each location is associated with a bridge or bridge group. The Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) will repair or replace bridges with this revenue.

http://www.dot.ri.gov/tolling/index.php

[Demsrule86]

12. It is a regressive tax which in the end hurts the working class.

[Wounded Bear]

10. As the world goes to EVs, something will be needed to offset fuel taxes...

Some sort of 'mileage tax' will have to be implemented. For now, there should be offsets against the fuel taxes currently paid so the burden is not too high on truckers, many of whom are small bussinesses trying to maintain independence.

Of course, higher taxes on the 1%/corporations should be implemented, too, with some of the general fund revenue being shifted into the Transportation grid.

[Demsrule86]

13. No. Fuel taxes were always a bad idea. We need to tax in different ways. Why should all these taxes

hurt the middle class and the poor while the well to do basically pay little to nothing.

[Wounded Bear]

14. Fine. Write it up...

stop howling at the moon about "unfairness" and tell us how to finance infrastructure.

[speak easy]

32. A financial transactions "Tobin" tax.

[kentuck]

15. That's only $25 for each hundred miles they drive...

That would only cost them $250 for one thousand-mile trip! Brilliant Republican solution!

[Yavin4]

17. More proof why Republicans love pushing cultural issues.

Because their actual policy positions screws the working class and is politically unpopular. So, let's Dr. Seuss everyone!

[TheFarseer]

20. Watch Sean Hannity argue this is not a tax

But inflation is a tax and it’s caused by Joe Biden. Actually he would probably never mention this or just say Chuck Schumer made Cornyn say it.

[BannonsLiver]

25. I wouldn't have a big problem with this if independent truckers were exempt

I’m not sure why some in the thread are getting their knickers in a twist over the idea of Coke,Walmart and others that use large trucks to ship products paying their fair share of taxes for using infrastructure. It’s fuckin weird.

[DFW]

26. That would be fine if a truck only worked in Rhode Island.

I wouldn‘t want to have that bill if I drove a semi through Texas, Montana, California or Alaska.

[David__77]

27. The right will start pushing mileage taxes heavily.

For one thing they’re probably pissed that electric cars will evade gas taxes.

[Rstrstx]

30. Many states have adopted EV registration surcharges

Often times they’re several hundred dollars

https://www.myev.com/research/interesting-finds/states-that-charge-extra-fees-to-own-an-electric-vehicle

[MineralMan]

34. And those slow down the acceptance of EVs, as well.

[jmowreader]

31. Cornyn didn't propose this to raise highway maintenance funds

The Republicans are working night and day to somehow get President Biden to violate his campaign pledge that he wouldn't raise taxes on the working class. That's all this is.

Reality is, the GOP has raided the Highway Trust Fund so long and so thoroughly the only way we're going to fix the roads properly now is to pay for it through the general fund.