Amen. Again, it's not a perfect system, but one way or another we have to pay to maintain the roads, and this seems a lot more equitable to me than doing it out of the general tax fund.
It's easy to get people to go along with something unfair if you can convince them it's fair.
Through several mechanisms, usage taxes push the cost onto the poorest and relieve the richest. The people who receive the least
wealth for their
time are made to pay the most. That's a disproportionate exchange of labor for use.
Let's say you make $27/hr (United States median household income). You drive 12,000 miles per year at 30mpg and you pay 25 cents per gallon of gas tax. That's $100/year, 3.7 hours of labor.
If you make $8.25/hr (minimum wage) and drive 12,000 miles at 30mpg, that's 12.1 hours of labor. That is to say: for the same driving, you pay 3.4 times as much in terms of working labor cost.
If you're a commercial freight driver, it doesn't actually matter what the gas tax costs; that's an expense, you roll it into your fees, and that moves down into the cost and the eventual
price of the product. Freight costs averaged $1.91 in 2016, with a $0.17 cent per mile fuel cost, and account for roughly 50% of the retail cost of many goods (such as food and clothing). That means the cost is 8.9% of the freight cost; a 25 cent per gallon fuel tax comes to 0.49%. The $27/hr guy and the $8.25/hr guy both pay this pretty directly--about 9.1 hours of labor for either. Compounding effects aren't explored here.
When you get up to people making $100/hr, things change.
The $100/hr guy only drives 20,000 miles, including a fancy sports car that gets 18mpg. That's $277 or 2.77 hours. He also invests about 9% of his gross income into his 401(k)--roughly $13,500 post-tax, $18k pre-tax--plus expends a large amount of income on his house and intangible goods like insurances. Call it 30% in total and he only pays 0.343% of that additional fuel tax on purchased goods and services, 6.86 hours.
So a guy making $27/hr and driving 12,000 miles pays 12.5h for roads; a guy making $8.25/hr and driving 12,000 miles pays 21.2h for roads; and a guy making $100/hr and driving 20,000 miles at 18mpg might pay 9.63h for roads (or as high as 11.9h).
If you can avoid getting super-liberal about it and trying to eat the rich for being rich, you can also point out that richer people are
also generally benefiting from income made by shipping those goods out to consumers--those consumers pay that fuel tax involved in the shipping of goods to them, and the revenues generated by the sale of those goods provide the source of income to pay paychecks of engineers, managers, and executives.
Calling this "equitable" is myopic. It's saying, "Well, you touch it, and we charge you more pennies the longer you touch it." Turns out you can play with it longer and harder and spend less time under the whip for the privilege than the next guy.
It's also hilariously bad logistics. The infrastructure costs are going to be largely based on economic activity; a general fund funded by an income tax is going to directly take part of that, and automatically adjusts for it. Because of the haphazard unevenness of a fuel tax or mileage tax, you'll need to keep adjusting that tax--notably, every bit of economic progress (technical growth) that doesn't make roads easier to build will require raising that tax. It's going to have to increase faster than inflation.
"Not a perfect system"? It's one of the worst systems ever designed. (Sales tax is the worst; a flat-tax general fund would be worse only because of its extreme scope, and it wouldn't be worse than a sales-tax-driven general fund--which would totally destroy the economy in a month.) Use taxes only make sense when the government is providing a commodity (because then you're
buying goods), like water; and even then, minimum usage rates make the most sense in most such systems.
Inequitable, inefficient, and unstable.