You can never win arguments about how you define taxes. If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment. I think lawmakers and statist types far too often mistake the rationale as 'the good thing we want to do with this money' rather than 'why you as an individual need to pay yet another tax or fee that we could have funded some other way.'

I don't think taxes should be too low and don't mind paying moderate amounts of tax, but I do think the number of taxes should be as low as possible to maintain legitimacy in the population. Nobody likes to feel nickel and dimed to death, so it's better to have a small number of predictable and easy to understand taxes than an endless variety of fees that add up to what feels disproportionately burdensome for the public. Policymakers need to remember that very few of the public are economic rationalists with pocket calculator brains.

> If it causes you financial pain it's gonna be felt as a punishment.

So...when you go to a restaurant and eat, paying feels like a punishment?

When you go to an amusement park, paying the entry fee feels like a punishment?

When you pay for a plane ticket...a new appliance...a movie...?

No, the only reason that "taxes are a punishment (or theft)" is a meme _at all_ is that there are a bunch of entitled, privileged, well-off folks who have decided that they have theirs and they don't want to spend anything that will improve or support society.

I've gone through these arguments a few times, and ... yeah, the naivete on the other side is profound. You're right that I won't "win" an argument with someone who espouses that, or at least I won't convince them of anything, but that's due to them ignoring reality.

In this particular case? A usage fee, for cars, that supports roads, for cars? Seems pretty damned natural-consequences to me. You're paying to use something, not "being punished" in any way.

What a strange and irrational comeback.

Road wear is disproportionately caused by heavy vehicles; one study estimated that "one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the impact of 9,600 cars". The gas tax is primarily a subsidy designed to support the trucking industry.

Or you can think of the trucking industry as subsidised. Trucks are used to haul goods to shops yes? Taxing them more will just increase the price of everyday goods and services (that depend on goods to function), it will unpopular among just about everyone but the rich (who won’t feel the impact of the price increase much).

You're not wrong, but this is the part where capitalism is supposed to encourage people to use methods that cost less in externalities. Businesses should pay for their externalities or else they aren't competing with each other fairly.

The question of who it is a subsidy to is important, but it is better to directly give them a subsidy than to skew the upstream market towards vehicles that damage roads and cost a ton of money to repair.

I doubt we'll get there though, I admit that we can't get anything effective done. And we'd need to effectively keep prices from rising at the register to even the playing field for infrastructure expenses.

I would love to see a citation for that as its a very surprising number!

Found it: https://www.gao.gov/products/109954

A couple of caveats: it's from 1979 and deals with interstates only.

We need trucks about as much as we need people in cars.

There is nothing we need but food and shelter, which is not the main payload for those trucks.

While some people might enjoy some of the useless consumerism crap that's moved from China to your closest shopping center via trucks, I enjoy driving my old petrol car through the landscape and to the track.

Now let's all step back, calm down and compromise. :)

Taxes are a form of punishment, they're a tool to discourage certain behaviours relative to others.

Whether roads are funded by road taxes or primary school fees doesn't matter - if we want to promote a behaviour we subsidize it; if we want to discourage it, we tax it.

Whether and how the books balance in the background isn't relevant.

Technically we want to punish people for driving a car. Electrics are of course better than ICEs, but they're still a lot worse that cycling or taking a train. It would of course be nice if the infrastructure wasn't optimized for cars...

I don't think income tax is there to punish you for having income: even with the tax higher pre-tax income results in higher after-tax income. But even if road usage linked fees were a punishment, it is against car ownership in general, which seems fair to me. The relative incentive of electric over gas is still there.

That's a simplistic view of one type of tax. If everyone in a community wants the city government to build a recreation center, and then government levies a tax on the citizens to pay for building/operating the center, are they being punished?

Punishment is really incorrect. Taxes are a form of incentive. It is a behavioral nudge, not a flogging.

Oh my god, no they aren’t. Taxes are a tool for society to function. They can be used to discourage things, sure, but they are not a punishment in most cases. Do you consider paying for your meal at a restaurant a punishment? Give me a break.

Then why are you not charged for napkins at a resturant? Regardless of need how the fees and taxes are distributed does lead to an effective discouragement - which is synonymous with punishment. It doesn't need an authority to impose them. The punishment for not unzipping your fly when peeing at a urinal is peeing your pants.

A tax on electric vehicles isn't necessary for society to function. It's just a medium for adding money to what is already more graft. So yes, it is effectively a tool to direct certain behaviors. As are all VAT and luxury taxes.

Income taxes are the major part of the income that society needs to function. The rest of the lot are just punitive ones, like estate and wealth taxes.

Taxes can be a perverse incentive for revenue hungry governments to encourage the taxable behavior.