It doesn’t matter. Hauling freight is a for profit business. Do you disagree that they would pass on additional costs incurred in order to still make the same profit?
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Joe is a consumer of some sort also. Almost everything is trucked at some point. Joe’s groceries and clothing goes up if transportation costs go up. Transportation costs will go up if the cost to transport freight goes up for the driver or freight company. I pay more than he does in shipping and handling if I decide to order patio furniture from halfway across the country. Of course it’s a moot point because it’s all made and shipped in from China anyway.
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You did not supply a link to support your assertion. I did.
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Property taxes don’t pay for freeways. Back to government finance 101. Finding local suppliers? It’s a long drive from China and even Mexico. Among other items too numerous to mention, I think what you are missing is the axle weight not total vehicle weight. More axles, less weight on each. Just physics, except for bridges where total weight counts.
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Says who? In NH we don’t have a sales tax. Property tax is per town which goes into the general fund. Most of our highways are paid for with Federal money. Maintaining the highways we pay for. And my property SHOULD help pay for the roads. Roads are used to ship the food I eat, the clothes I buy, the lumber to build my house, and for first responders to be able to come to my house in an emergency. It’s in my best interest to help pay for roads and maintenance.
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I should say roads and streets as in a city can be paid for with the help of property taxes plus special assessment to the adjacent property owners for streets, curb, gutter, sewer. But roads and streets in a city are different than highways and freeways.
Joe would rather pay more for groceries, and possibly switch to more local suppliers to get around the increased cost for groceries shipped from Mexico and such. This would allow Joe to have lower non transportation related taxes, since these non transportation related taxes are paying nearly half of the cost of road maintenance.
Joe remembers the factory job that he lost when the factory closed down and moved off shore. Joe doesn’t want his taxes to be used to subsidize the cost of on highway shipments of goods coming in from China and Mexico, which is what contributed to him to losing his original job.
Why would you want your property tax to pay to maintain roads when you could have lower property tax but higher highway freight costs and higher costs for goods that you buy? If you fall on hard times you can back off on what you buy, but you can’t get your property tax lowered. The reduced property tax would more than make up for the higher cost of goods. Remember the price of locally produced goods won’t go up.
I would like to see big toll booths on the highways at state borders that semi trucks would have to use. It would be a big toll like $20. Semis cause so much damage to roads that it would be well justified. It could even be attached to a weigh station and the charge could be by weight.
Too bad, Joe. There are things I don’t want to fund with my taxes too.
For ol Joe to be able to not purchase anything transported by truck, he’s going to need to be a farmer/homeless/jobless/off the grid guy. Which is fine. Then he’ll pay no taxes or incur any freight costs.
But, once you buy anything that was transported, some of the cost of that item is freight. And that cost will go up if it costs the carrier more to move it. That is my point. They’ll pass the cost along. If Joe can avoid it, great for him.
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That’s my point. Do you think freight carriers will charge more to deliver (hence the price of goods go up and the cost is passed along to the consumer)? I do.
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And that sir is what we call a democratic republic. Joe can vote for whatever he wants but the decisions are made by those elected to represent joe.
If course they will charge more. Then there will be more competition from locally produced items which aren’t affected by the higher transportation costs, which is what I want to happen. It’s bad enough that foreign goods are cheaper and cause domestic factories to go out of business, and subsidizing the cost of transporting those imported goods across the country is even worse.
Perhaps oil companies and the automotive industry have contributed to making our current system the way it is where a large portion of the cost of road maintenance is paid for by non transportation related taxes. The last thing they want is to have increased railroad use or more local production of goods.
I can write a long chapter of a book showing you that your philosophy is wrong, but no time no room. But the summary of the chapter would be: It is never good to artificially inflate costs of one service to accommodate one of a service of less value. The best practice is to provide a service that is desired and affordable whenever possible. Not all services are possible locally. To fix transportation problems by artificially inflating the cost will not work in a society of greed.
What about artificially lowering the costs of one service?
That’s an extremely simplistic and unrealistic way to view it. Everyone benefits from well maintained roads. Businesses can’t get goods to and from their business in a timely manor without well maintained roads. This means less jobs, lower economy. NH gets a lot of money from tourism (skiing during the winter and the beach for summer and the mountains for hiking in all seasons). Without well maintained roads those businesses dry up.
Learn a little about commerce and how businesses work…then come back.
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I agree with you there, but I blame consumers (myself included) and some of our government policies more than I blame trucking. I’m definitely in favor of domestic production. But a domestic manufacturing facility is still going to need to transport raw materials in and ship product out a pretty good distance in order to survive. For example, there used to be a plant in West Point, MS that made Flexible Flyer snow sleds. They could probably get a lot of the raw materials from in state (I assume), but they’d have to ship the sleds throughout the country. You only need a snow sled once every few years in MS 
. Of course, the plant eventually moved to China, but I think low transportation costs is the least of the reasons why. If you raised road taxes on trucks in the US, you’d probably hurt a manufacturer in West Point, MS as much as you would hurt a manufacturer in China. They’ll both often ship throughout the US (from the facility if domestic or from the port or a distribution center if foreign).
Kind of a difficult situation with domestic manufacturing. We all want cheap goods, good wages, a clean environment, and a safe workplace. Difficult to balance that and compete with manufacturers in a foreign country who dump their waste in the river, pay meager wages, and never get sued or bat an eye if someone loses a finger. Best thing I know to do is make the playing field less level to favor domestic manufacturers. Tarriffs or fees on imports or something. Not additional fees on domestic transport (not for the purpose of favoring domestic / local manufacturing, at least).
Increasing the usage fees for roads would bring in more money to maintain the roads and/or reduce the usage of the roads, which would cause the roads to be in better condition not worse.
It would increase the cost of West Point goods and Chinese goods, but consumers would have less tax money going to road maintenance, so they would be able to afford the higher priced goods.
Looking at the big picture, wouldn’t it be better to use the non transportation related tax income to subsidize manufacturing at West Point directly, rather than have it go to road maintenance and therefore subsidized transportation? The highway transportation subsidy helps both Chinese goods and West Point, but subsidizing West Point just helps West Point.
We have Monopoly laws that are supposed to solve that law. But again due to greed and corruption those checks and balances sometimes fail.
Sue doesn’t have any kids and shouldn’t have her taxes used to pay part of the education cost to send your kids to public schools. Why should she have to pay more because you decided to have kids?
Bob is 22 years old and still has a 50 year working life/career ahead of him. Bob shouldn’t have to pay taxes that help pay for senior citizen health care and housing assistance and hospice because old folks didn’t plan properly.
Tom lives at the outskirts of town in a concrete block house with a steel roof. Tom shouldn’t have to pay taxes that support the city fire department that he will never need.
And so on…
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Those are such great points! The situation with Sue is a bit difficult. The idea is that the children, who are separate individuals from the parents, need to be educated to benefit society and build the country. If the parents don’t want to pay for education it hurts the children, and the country, and everybody. In the past Bob wouldn’t have had to pay taxes for this. And it some towns Tom has to sign up for protection from the fire department. There was a case where the fire department put out a portion of a house fire that spread to a neighbor’s house, but refused to put out the fire on the house it originated from because the owner hadn’t payed up!
Big jump today or the last couple days. The sign said $4.19 today, up from $3.79.