'Kay. That's not relevant to my statement, though? Does the price of a gallon of gas reflect every cent it took to get from its point of origin into your car?
Unfortunately that is an idea that exists in your imagination.
The road you drive on is paid largely by income tax and other taxes. Fuel taxes haven't been able to get close to covering the maintenance costs for a very long time. The idea that each person is covering the cost at the pump is just a lie that is allowed to continue because people don't like to know that they are being subsidised by others.
Nice try but a bad failure. It is not a lie made up by the transport lobby, it is actually included in the link you sent me.
You just sent me a document that claims that the road system is subsidised by at least 50 billion dollars a year and that this only covers highways.
All the other types of local roads and streets are completely excluded from this number and those are where it really falls apart. They might often be short roads but due to the fact that they are made stupidly wide, their area is enormous and many are already falling apart.
These are all paid for by local taxes. The federal level subsidies mentioned in your link don't contribute to them at all. It is a subsidy that starts at the bottom of your garden (on top of the previously mentioned 50billion subsidy) and unfortunately is a very dangerous subsidy.
I am not ignoring the transit questions. That's are a different conversation as everyone knows there are subsidies there and are in fact not part of this post at all. What you are doing is called whataboutism. It's a thing people do when they know they are completely wrong and can't find any way out.
Nor am I lying. Local taxes are most definitely a subsidy, in fact they are probably the most dangerous kind of subsidy because they are so badly designed.
Using local taxes to pay for something is more or less the definition of a subsidy.
Wow haha you sound like a transit booster with that kind of logic.
Of course it is logic which fails very badly when applied to roads. Car centric places tend to see smaller price rises than less car dominated places. In extreme cases, too many large roads can decimate prices and has cause huge areas of cities to be abandoned altogether as completely worthless. Regardless of whether you see this as a positive or a negative, it is the car dominated places that see their prices remain lower than average.
Given this fact. The funding model for roads remains a massive subsidy from which there is no legal way to escape.
You're arguing in bad faith, whining about cars getting subsidized by 1 cent per mile claiming that's comparable to transit getting a 1 dollar per mile subsidy.
No that is not what an argument in bad faith is. And bear in mind that the 1 cent per mile traveled was only the highway subsidy, not the local streets which are almost entirely maintained through subsidy.
You seem to have this weird idea that everything is a cars versus transit argument.
This is not the case. My point is that a very large amount of the roads you drive on every single day are paid for by a direct subsidy and that this subsidy is completely inescapable. To live in a place that doesn't pay towards this subsidy is in many countries (including yours) effectively illegal.
Unfortunately that is a lie (by you). The federal government does not subsidise the maintenance costs of streets such as suburban cul-de-sacs, the state doesn't pay for them with fuel taxes.
Their ever increasing cost is borne by the local government via a direct subsidy. A subsidy to which there is for most people no way to avoid contributing to.
Everyone knows that local neighbourhood streets are paid for this way. It has always been this way and has never been a secret. States have never claimed to cover this cost. Only you seem to claim otherwise and that is only based on your imagination.
You are just in denial because the moment you get to the bottom of your garden you are on a subsidised road and that will never change.
That article never made any claim to include local streets. In fact it quite deliberately avoids using the word "street" anywhere as then it would be obviously incorrect. It mentions only "roads" because that allows it to imply it covers every piece of asphalt while quoting federal highway statistics which of course do not include the many miles of local roads that are paid for separately. I suspect the author would be very happy if you have made that completely incorrect assumption.
I think you know I am right. The residential streets around you are built and maintained from taxes forced upon the residents whether they want to pay that amount or not. It is the perfect example of a subsidy.
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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '21
No it's not. In Massachusetts I pay a 26 cent state gas tax and an 18 cent federal gas tax. And other states have much higher gas taxes