I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free, but yet be forced to pay a tax when I use (semi-)public transportation?
You in particular don't pay for permits, parking, tolls, fuel and sales taxes, licensing, registrations, etc. You do, however, get to enjoy all of the benefits of living in a society with ubiquitous transportation and democratized access to roads and infrastructure.
None of the minor fees you mention gets anywhere near to the cost of road maintenance, not to mention the effects on the health of people near roads, all the people killed in traffic, the environmental damage, etc etc
Do you purchase goods which were moved by road? Where does your food come from and how does it get to you? How do you generate your income and does any of that rely on transportation?
This would be a good argument if the road network was sized for transporting goods primarily. As it stands, road networks in population centres are largely sized to accommodate private motoring.
First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.
> I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free
That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.
Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads.
> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit.
This isn't quite true. If Uber charged more to increase profit, they would lose more customers to competitors who didn't increase their prices.
Taxes can increase costs for (some of) those competitors as well. In that scenario, prices could rise to absorb the tax and there would be less relative change between competitors.
This is important for incentivising 'societal values', e.g. reducing pollution, increasing public health, etc.; either directly by discouraging people from choosing single-occupier taxis like Uber in favour of e.g. trains and buses; or indirectly by causing companies to compete on reducing their harm (and thereby avoiding the tax).
I don't have specific examples to hand, but I recall some companies advocating for such taxes (e.g. a carbon tax), since they want to make bigger improvements, but doing so individually would make them uncompetitive.
> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true
It absolutely is in the long run. Reduced margin means fewer competitors and subsequently higher sustained costs for riders. There is little barrier to entry in the “rideshare” market so as long as high margins exist competitors will keep entering with cheaper prices to eat at the margin.
There is no scenario in a competitive market where an input cost is not reflected in the output cost of a good/service.
idk. I’ve yet to see an industry that doesn’t concentrate to fewer and fewer operators with time, regardless of taxation.
A natural law of wealth accumulation dictates that as trade continues the players with more wealth already, are increasingly more likely to get even more wealth at the cost of those with less. At time of hardship you would expect the less wealthy players to loose the business which eventually concentrates the industry to 2-5 players through acquisition or bankruptcy. Taxation is actually a way to counter this phenomena by means of redistribution.
EDIT: To clarify the above is only true if industries are competing for customers against each other. While a market is growing the growth of one player does not necessarily come at the cost of another. However at some point the market will be saturated and businesses new customers are exponentially more likely to come from a competitor rather then new to the market. At this point the premise holds true.
> First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is.
I am forced to pay taxes for the roads since you can't possibly fund all of the rodes solely by taxing ride-sharing companies.
> Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true.
Eh. Economics is not an exact science so there is no way for me to prove it to you. If you don't believe in that (and have another reason why iPhones are more expensive in higher taxed countries) then let's leave that.
> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.
Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).
> Your hair stylist uses them to get to work [...] Imagine your situation if there were no roads.
There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.
> It's a private, for-profit company.
Taxis are private and for profit, yet they are considered public transportation.
>> That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community.
> Then why not subsidize cars, or better yet, offer a free car per citizen? In fact, "we" decided that we should tax cars and maybe we should also tax car usage (gas, roads, pollution, ...).
OK, why or why not? Are you proposing something?
> There should be roads. And private drivers shouldn't get out of paying for them.
They do pay, via their taxes, which is the generally appropriate way to fund public goods.
I was responding to your proposal that businesses pay extra, via medallions to use the roads, while private drivers use the road for free (ie. no extra). Rather, I am saying that every user of the road should par for it.
Why should people pay any tax for any public good that they don't use personally? Schools, healthcare, parks & rec, homeless shelters, space exploration, national defense, fire fighters, vaccine development.
Personal transportation isn't like the things you mentioned. It has -by itself- value to the individual, but not to society. Having no fire fighters quickly becomes an obvious problem. Not having people drive their personal cars all over the city does not.
"Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals". Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.
> "Value to society" is the summation of "value to individuals".
I disagree, not necessarily, and probably not in the case of unnecessary personal transportation (which is most of it). Everyone in society profits from fire fighters or hospitals, even when they don't need either just this instance. That's not the same for some luxury that some/most people enjoy and want everyone to fund.
> Arguing that people should not have personal transportation is arguing that "we" have the right to dictate people's lifestyles to them.
And we do, and we don't consider that an issue. People shouldn't have personal nuclear bombs, even though some would like to. Also, few people are arguing that personal transportation shouldn't exist, just that the required infrastructure should be funded differently.
Yes, in principle. Frustratingly, for a goal like 'moving around cheaply, conveniently and safely, with minimal environmental impact', then subsidising driving is a worse investment than public transport.
The person I was replying to was not complaining about how revenue is distributed, they were complaining about revenue being spent at all on a public good that they don't use.
I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to rebalance the equations on how we spend money on roads, public transit, and various forms of energy subsidies. But all else being equal, getting that balance "right" is not going to make personal transit just go away. Some will shift to public transit, but you will always have a case of "your tax money" going to pay for roads used by private transit.
Agreed. But if you analyse things then it's likely people use those facilities at a secondary level - eg you get something done for you by people who used schools to enable them, someone who provides value to your life used the healthcare services.