Solid point is I hadn’t been called too Canadian and too rich again for the 100th time and there weren’t the 100 other completely disingenuous posts in this “discussion”.
I’m completely fucking done with engaging in one sided good faith debate in front of an onslaught of xenophobia and bad faith.
If we want to burn UP to the fucking ground I am good to play too. Light the matches.
I’m literally standing outside the hospital right now staring through a window unable to visit my mom. I am totally up some destruction.
Nobody seems to like UP anymore so let’s burn it down
I have no doubt that if you try to extract money from the sale of goods and their shipment by truck, no matter how you do it, they will be trying to squeeze as much of it as they can out of truck drivers. That’s kind of a broader problem though. The result should be that freight is more expensive and people who buy so much shit should pay for it. People should consume less. And Bezos should make less money because of those things.
The highway fund is $43B. The $791B was the cost of just the shipping. The value of what’s shipped each year has to be several trillion. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket for trucking to pay for highways. And I have no idea how to get people to stop shopping online as a hobby. And people talk about Bezos…really it’s Amazon that needs to be taxed and quit having their shipping subsidized. Bezos too, for sure, but Amazon.
You’ve actually convinced me that your side is probably correct here. Too many posters that I normally vehemently disagree with are arguing on the same side I am, so I think I’m probably wrong.
Meh, I was coming at this from a purely environmental angle. Taxing EV’s the same as gas guzzlers seems to not make sense for that. OTOH, EV’s are still super fuckign expensive so its kinda regressive I guess to let EV’s freeload off of gas guzzlers. I don’t know, it’s complicated. In any event, lol at “taking their ball and going home.”
I haven’t really followed the policy debate but why would you do a mileage tax rather than just tax gas more? Gas is too cheap in the US. It goes for about $US 1/gallon more here than there. As far as I can tell the answer to this is that raising gas taxes is politically unpopular, but it’s hard for me to see how a VMT tax wouldn’t also be extremely unpopular, as well as way more complicated to implement and begging for evasion attempts.
Edit: I guess a VMT is stable over time so you don’t have to keep increasing it, but it’s a dumb incentive structure. Basically it boils down to “good policy is too hard so let’s do bandaid policy instead”, just like in healthcare.
Skimming through the last 48hrs of posts I have to realize we are fucked. When I thought this election was the last chance to have a chance to tackle climate change I couldnt be more wrong. We are approaching summer in big steps so I assume meaningful laws wont happening before autumn, then it takes time to implement them and adding the time the effects will show. Elections in 2022 are already looming again as well. How long before meaningful public transport is built? How long before people actually can consider using the car less? Building that needs resources as well. Cement is also one of the worst co2 offenders. Maybe you should consider closing down remote living areas, reforest them and move the people closer to a city or village that can fulfill basic needs. I am not serious it’s just my hopelessness speaking. And that is just the US, we still need the other offenders to follow them later-
They can’t actually pay the drivers less. If they could pay less they already would be. At this point in trucking costs get passed on 100%.
Increasing taxes on trucking would increase general costs to operate a business that sells general merchandise, since most businesses with large transportation costs as a % of top line revenue are also low margin you’ll see an increase in costs in places like the produce section at the grocery store and home depot.
Personally I look at the state of play for global capitalism and am immediately certain that the single biggest problem is cheap input materials (because the true costs of those input materials environmentally aren’t being paid, and that makes things like selling cheap disposable plastic shit viable business models.
The way I see it for capitalism to work we need every single physical good to be engineered to either be fully recyclable or continue working as long as the physical inputs exist. This will make stuff more expensive and the citizens need to be paid enough to afford to buy these things. We need cultural shift in our consumption habits as a global civilization away from quantity to quality. That’s basically the only way we can maintain anything resembling the current living standard long term without going to 5 degrees C IMO.
I don’t think raising transportation costs would be bad for the global economy. All that does is change the math on how to efficiently setup the supply chain. Less international movement (which is very expensive carbon wise) and more clustering supply chains around where their inputs are cheapest/local to avoid transportation cost. There would be nothing negative about that for workers honestly, as the resource they are currently trying to locate near is cheap labor in developing countries.
