Call it a step in the right direction. But…
The Pennsylvania Senate Transportation Committee has approved a bipartisan bill to charge non-commercial electric vehicle (EV) owners a $290 annual fee ($24.17 in monthly installments) to help pay for highway improvements.
Reports the Tribune-Review:
“The yearly fee equates to roughly to what the state Department of Transportation estimates owners of gas-powered vehicles pay each year in the state’s gas tax at its current rate of 61 cents per gallon, among the nation’s highest. Revenue from the gas tax goes into the state’s Motor License fund that pays for highway infrastructure projects and supports state police operations.”
The Trib also notes that the measure would “exempt them from paying an alternative fuels tax but would maintain the alternative fuels tax at public charging stations.”
While it’s laudable that publicly subsidized vehicle charging stations will be paid for, at least in part, by users, it raises a long-running point of order:
Why should the public have any skin in subsidizing public electric vehicle charging stations? It should not. And, for that matter, why should there even be public EV charging stations? There should not be.
We certainly do not recall government paying for gasoline stations with the advent of internal combustion motor vehicles in the early 1900s, or ever. It was the oil companies that saw a great profit potential and risked their own money to serve the motoring public.
If there’s truly a natural market demand for EV’s, their manufacturers and/or electric utilities should spend their own money building out and maintaining private charging station networks in the pursuit of profit.
But that won’t happen. Why? Because government wholly perverted the market for EVs — using the cudgel of “The State” to not only force automakers to manufacture EVs but to subsidize them and buyers with taxpayer dollars to create an artificial demand.
And in an attempt to further that demand, government has decided to impose ever stricter pollution standards that will, if allowed to go into effect, lead to the extinction of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.
To further mask the series of dubious government interventions that, at their base, are marketplace lies, government then uses more taxpayer dollars to bring the lie to full circle.
Government is undermining free and open markets for what is no less than the latest in a long line of attempts to command the marketplace. Such command economics is not sustainable. It never has been. It never will be. It will collapse under its own hubris.
And, as is normal with such machinations, at great public expense.
All this said, Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, says the state Legislature should go further:
“There should also be a separate tax to cover disposal of these lethal EV batteries and a fee to cover the environmental damage created through mining of the lithium and other minerals needed for the batteries,” the Ph.D. economist notes.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
