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The States: Where We Wish Texas Would Secede Already

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LynahFan said:
You’re not getting it. If gas tax receipts drop 5% this year, raise the rates 5% next year to keep the gas tax *revenue* flat. Roads are paid for by the people still driving gas vehicles - there will just be fewer and fewer of them.



All I read is “Wouldn’t it be horrible if the externalities of gasoline had to be paid by the people using it rather than continuing to be subsidized by society?”
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But this isn't about the externalities of gasoline, it's about the externalities of driving.
 
LynahFan said:
You’re not getting it. If gas tax receipts drop 5% this year, raise the rates 5% next year to keep the gas tax *revenue* flat. Roads are paid for by the people still driving gas vehicles - there will just be fewer and fewer of them.

All I read is “Wouldn’t it be horrible if the externalities of gasoline had to be paid by the people using it rather than continuing to be subsidized by society?”
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I'm all for raising the gas tax; the federal one hasn't been raised in something like 20 years.

But electric vehicles still put wear and tear on the roads. It's not wholly without merit to try to get them to pay into the highway fund through alternative means.
 
unofan said:
I'm all for raising the gas tax; the federal one hasn't been raised in something like 20 years.

But electric vehicles still put wear and tear on the roads. It's not wholly without merit to try to get them to pay into the highway fund through alternative means.
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Exactly right. The tonnage of vehicles on the roads is what wears down the asphalt, not the fuel consumed to propel them.

Also, early adopters of electric vehicles have not been the poor people, those buying the cheapest vehicles out there so they can get to their jobs. Sales taxes are regressive in nature, and a gas tax is just a slight alteration of that same beast.

Keep the gas tax at X%, and then increase license plate fees. In MN, plate fees aren’t flat. In my experience, again for MN, new cars have plate registration fees of around $500, and it slides down each year until holding flat at 7 years, about $50/year. Let’s not punish the poor for having jobs in locations not served by public transportation.
 
St. Clown said:
Exactly right. The tonnage of vehicles on the roads is what wears down the asphalt, not the fuel consumed to propel them.

Also, early adopters of electric vehicles have not been the poor people, those buying the cheapest vehicles out there so they can get to their jobs. Sales taxes are regressive in nature, and a gas tax is just a slight alteration of that same beast.

Keep the gas tax at X%, and then increase license plate fees. In MN, plate fees aren’t flat. In my experience, again for MN, new cars have plate registration fees of around $500, and it slides down each year until holding flat at 7 years, about $50/year. Let’s not punish the poor for having jobs in locations not served by public transportation.
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Or don't use a user fee model for highways. Don't charge based on the wear on the highway. Accept that having highways is important to all of us in a post-medieval society. Fund highways, and everything else, out of the general fund. Replenish that with aggressively graduated income and wealth taxes.

As for high carbon footprint industries, recognize carbon footprint as another externality, just like the price of cleaning up pollution. Tax carbon emitters like other polluters: meter their factories and products.
 
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I don't miss it often. But sometimes. Just sometimes...

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There are at least 250,000 people in this photograph, and every one of them is a dick.


 
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If I lived in Louisiana, my house would be up on 6’ stilts, and my lawn wouldn’t be encircled by a fence so much as a permanent sandbag wall with built in bilge pumps.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
That's both beautiful and awful at the same time
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It's overwhelming. One reason NYers are such pieces of work is their environment is impossible to deal with directly so they retreat into an abstract model of it. This includes other people, so they aren't having human contacts anymore. They are dueling avatars.

NYC has been social media as a LARP for a hundred years. Unsurprisingly, behavior follows the same distributions.
 
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Slap Shot said:
As you know it feels much less daunting from the ground
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Just the opposite, for me. I never fail in NYC to look around and think "I will never have any effect on the world. Everything I will ever do is a puff of smoke. I make no difference."

For me, it is incredibly demoralizing, as irrational as that is. In a simple landscape I feel "I could make a change, have an impact." I feel much better when I get away from Trantor.
 
Kepler said:
Just the opposite, for me. I never fail in NYC to look around and think "I will never have any effect on the world. Everything I will ever do is a puff of smoke. I make no difference."

For me, it is incredibly demoralizing, as irrational as that is. In a simple landscape I feel "I could make a change, have an impact." I feel much better when I get away from Trantor.
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One of my daughters matriculated at Columbia. She'd had some prior short term experience with NYC, and seemed a perfect fit for that irreverence Columbia seems to have. She excelled in the classroom right away and had good room and apartment mates but gradually found the whole loud, gray, sunless, NYC/Columbia environment intolerable and left after two years. Has since lived in Istanbul, which is also loud and crowded, and Chicago, which is . . . you know. Loved Istanbul and likes Chi. NYC just battered her soul.
 
burd said:
One of my daughters matriculated at Columbia. She'd had some prior short term experience with NYC, and seemed a perfect fit for that irreverence Columbia seems to have. She excelled in the classroom right away and had good room and apartment mates but gradually found the whole loud, gray, sunless, NYC/Columbia environment intolerable and left after two years. Has since lived in Istanbul, which is also loud and crowded, and Chicago, which is . . . you know. Loved Istanbul and likes Chi. NYC just battered her soul.
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I’ve always told people (mainly midwesterners) that living in Chicago isn’t anything like living in nyc. I often joke that Chicago is full of people who couldn’t handle nyc.

I barely lasted two years there, I’m one of them.
 
Deutsche Gopher Fan said:
I’ve always told people (mainly midwesterners) that living in Chicago isn’t anything like living in nyc. I often joke that Chicago is full of people who couldn’t handle nyc.

I barely lasted two years there, I’m one of them.
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Not being able to handle nyc is a good character reference.

There are of course good New Yorkers (they tend have grown up super rich). But in general being well adjusted to a sick environment is not a healthy sign. There are people who do really well in prison, too.
 
My theory is that no city can be both fun to visit and live in. Which is significantly inflicted by my distaste for living in large cities. And there is almost certainly an age component. The older you get, the more this theory becomes true.

NYC: Amazing to visit. You'd have to put a gun to my head to live there.
Twin Cities: Great place to live. Buuuut not exactly a tourist destination.

There can be cities where neither are true. Most cities fall into that category.
 
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