Subject: tax rate
This is in response to Jon and Alan's posts about tax rates (
/m12,
/m18,
/m19).
I think the tax rate should not be set so high that it's a real obstacle for people who want to participate. And yet it should be set high enough that it does begin to reflect the true costs of driving. We want to provide some real disincentive for driving, and we want to have enough revenue to provide meaningful funding to help offset the impact of our driving.
That said, I'd be perfectly comfortable with anything in the range of 25 to 50 cents per gallon. Initially we wanted to set the tax rate so that it closely matched the externalized costs of the CO2 emissions. But that proved to be difficult. It's hard to know exactly what the real costs are. Economics, climate science, and public policy are inexact sciences. The initial rate of 50 cents per gallon was just a ballpark guess. It's a reasonable rate, but I think 25 cents per gallon is a reasonable rate too, especially if we're talking about also offering an option where people will be paying an air travel tax as well.
I had already cast my vote this year, for 50 cents per gallon, but I sent mail to Jeffrey today asking him to change my vote to something lower. Plus it sounds like Alan will vote for something lower, and my mom was talking about voting for something lower this year.
I'm a little concerned about our voting process. This is what our web site says about the official policy... "Figures from all members are collected, and the new tax rate is set at the average of the median 80% of suggested rates. This is an attempt to get the sense of the group while discarding suggestions outside a reasonable range."
I think that policy might make sense if we had a large number of members, and some of the votes were clearly frivolous, like $8,000/gallon. But given that we have only a small number of members, I think it's especially important that everybody's vote should count. I think we need to figure out some other way to weed out extreme votes, but still count everybody's votes when people are voting for what they really think is the right thing to do.
Any suggestions for crafting a better voting policy?
Brian (skinner@gumption.org)
