>Actually, public goods associated with automobile transportation - roads,
>traffic control, police protection, safety testing, etc. are already
>financed by government i.e. general taxes. The only difference is the
>point of collection, gasoline tax is collected at the pump while general
>taxes - from your mortgage payments or paychecks.
>Given the mildly progressive nature of our tax system and essentially
>regressive nature of gasoline tax - this is not necessarily a bad thing.
To the extent that these things are financed by local taxes then the finance is not mildly progressive - it's mildly to severely regressive.
My guru on auto finance, Charlie Komanoff (who's a big fan of technophilic user fees), says that the regressiveness of gas taxes is exaggerated, and what problem there is could be offset with income tax rebates. Poor people suffer enormously from the wretched state of public transit in the U.S. - many low-wage workers have to take the bus, which means hours of commuting to & from some crappy job every day - so merely keeping gas prices low to help the poor is pretty inadequate.
>The same pertains to the various "user fees" proposed by some technofiles
>(e.g. electronically recorded fees for using specific roads or even lanes,
>sort of E-Z Pass writ large) - these fees would hit the communiting working
>class harder than the leisure class.