The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week released a report that said taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance at a time when federal funds are short."Any given driver’s highway use also imposes costs on other users, on nearby nonusers, on the environment, and on the economy in the form of congestion, risk of accidents, noise, emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants that affect local air quality, and dependence on foreign oil," CBO said.
On how to implement the idea, CBO said it is unclear how much it would cost to "install metering equipment in all of the nation's cars and trucks.""Having the devices installed as original equipment under a mandate to vehicle manufacturers would be relatively inexpensive but could lead to a long transition; requiring vehicles to be retrofitted with the devices could be faster but much more costly, and the equipment could be more susceptible to tampering than factory-installed equipment might be," CBO said...
The report added that VMT taxes could be tracked and even collected at filling stations. "If VMT taxes were collected at the pump, each time fuel was purchased, information would be sent from a device in the vehicle to a device at the filling station," it said.
If we are going to do this, make it simple:
Car insurance companies have the make and year of your car(s) listed on their records. Have them report to the government this information. The government could then send out key chain tags with bar codes telling about each car you own to each owner. The tag would tell the year and make of the car, things that would help the government decide the average mpg that type of car gets per gallon of gas.
When you fill up at a gas station, the station or you, would scan your key chain tag using a scan machine similar to a credit card scanner, which would record the amount of gas you purchased that day. If the total amount of gas along with mpg you purchased for the year is beyond a certain amount, then an additional tax is added to your daily purchase. As each new year begins your record is put back to zero.
As for cars that are not insured, we have that problem when it comes to anything about driving (no license, no insurance, etc...), so it is just something the police will catch at a routine stops.
This would be much easier than making every car be fitted with a device.
Got a better more efficient idea besides the obvious (don't tax us)?