From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2000 - 06:38:00 MDT
On Mon, 05 Jun 2000, James Wetterau wrote:
>
> Privatize the roads! Make all transit user-pays.
>
> After all, do long-haul commuters
> really pay their fair share of the road costs? (To tell you the
> truth, I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the federal and
> state governments end up subsidizing driving, at least for certain
> drivers.
Actually, I suspect that everyone pays more than their fair
share. The problem isn't that some people aren't paying their fair share,
rather it is that the government wastes 90+% of the money it takes for this
purpose. As I've said before, I am an advocate of use-based taxation in
principle, but more "fairness" could be extracted from the system merely
by removing the gross inefficiencies from the process.
The only thing the state and federal governments are subsidizing is their
own waste. If you are paying taxes at all, the odds are that you are more
than paying your "fair share" by any free market metric, no matter how much
you drive.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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