If a luxury tax was levied on your vehicle, would you pay it to keep driving?

$600 a year? I would have no choice but to pay it, as I need my vehicle to get to work. I have about a 80 mile round trip commute and I don’t live within walking distance of a bus or train, so…..I suppose if I had to I could take a taxi to the train but then I may as well pay the tax for the car and just have the convenience of the car. $600 annually is $50 per month, so that breaks down to about $12.50 per week. Not that bad.

@jca I have about a 80 mile round trip commute and I don’t live within walking distance of a bus or train, so…..I suppose if I had to I could take a taxi to the train but then I may as well pay the tax for the car and just have the convenience of the car
Eventually you would have a way to get to work, or the train via mass transit, then from the train to work and back again. Now, time wise I do not know it is would be worth an extra $600 dollars, if it were more than that, would it still be a bargain?

$600 is slightly more than I pay for six months of full coverage auto insurance. public transportation could never get me to where I need to go.I would gladly pay it so that I can earn a decent living and also have the freedom to travel inimpeded.

^ How high of a luxury tax would they have to slap on your private vehicle (and that is per vehicle) before it would no longer be a luxury?

@Hypocrisy_Central: Some who commute take a bus at 7:20 a.m to arrive by 9, which means, to catch that bus they have to leave before 7 (probably driven by someone in their household). So that’s a 2 hour ride each way. My commute is about 40 minutes. The difference between a 40 minute ride and a 20 hour ride is huge. For me, it would severely impact my morning, my evening and my ability to pick up my daughter on time from her after school program. As I said, $12.50 a week is cake. Gas prices have been over $4 per gallon at times and I had to pay that – that was more than $12.50 per week with my commute. I have little choice.

^ If the tax were, say $2,000 a year per private vehicle, would it still be a bargain, or if it weren’t it would just be an expense you’d have to budget for?

@Hypocrisy_Central: I’d have to deal with it. I need the car to make my salary, so unless I want to sit in the house and be on welfare, I gotta do what I gotta do.

Wouldn’t it be great if they would do that? I already find cars too expensive and too cumbersome to be worth having in this city. It’s much easier and faster to get around by bike or public transit. Putting more money into those systems makes a lot of sense.

I would vote for somebody else.

That would cause a tax revolt overnight.

I think we did pay a luxury tax when we bought some of our cars. My husband, he is the car person, would pay whatever tax he had to to comply with the law. He loves his cars, and is a rule follower.

Yes. and at this point in my life give serious consideration to moving out into the countryside where they don’t worry about things like this.

Every job I’ve had in my adult life has been somewhere mass transit won’t go. Some of them have been at hours buses won’t run either. Hell, It’s been over a decade since I lived within 15 miles of work. The only job I had where it was even remotely feasible involved me waking up 3 hours before my shift to catch the first bus, and wait half an hour in the sketchiest part of town waiting for a second bus that dropped me off about a mile from work. And that was about $30/week in fares, making it cheaper to pay for gas and insurance.

FYI, not everyone who lives in the city works in the city. Cars are not a luxury for most workers, especially not those who cannot find reasonably-priced housing near their job. If they added the tax to incentivize mass transit then I would be out of work through no fault of my own as would tens of millions of others, therefore eligible for unemployment. Great cost-cutting measure!

It wouldn’t be worth paying a cent to me, but it’d be worth going to prison to do bad things to anyone who supported such a measure. Oh, and if I’m in prison, that means the government would lose money on me instead of having me as a revenue source. THAT is fiscally responsible!

@rojo My grandmother moved into the city in her 70’s so she didn’t have to drive, and food (including groceries) were easily delivered to her apartment. Moreover, hospitals and doctors aren’t very far away (although city traffic could slow an ambulance (God forbid).

$600 would be too much for me. I think $300 would be my limit.

Currently I pay fees of $185/year (between city and state).

Where I live a car is not a necessity. Public transportation covers 90% of my needs. We have car sharing programs.

And I don’t have kids. If I had kids I would pay the $600.

In states like NC and VA you have to pay property tax on your car every year.

The US govt. holds no sway over me or my ££££££‘s, so fuck ya tax $$$$$$‘s & stick em up ya arse.

When I lived with my mom in Sacramento it was cheaper to drive to Oregon to register her car. In California they wanted around 250 to get new tags that were only good for a year. In Oregon it was ten bucks to get tags good for two years.

I don’t drive so I can’t really comment on what I would pay to keep my car since I have never had a license.

But driving is so ingrained with freedom here I wouldn’t be shocked if car ownership is relatively inelastic. People will suck dick behind a 7/11 to keep their cars.

Look at gas prices. They can double and people manage. They just buy less of other things.

@johnpowell Well, some also consider having a job “freedom”, and many people with jobs require cars to get and keep that job. Of course, when gas prices doubled, I had to cut down on things like doctor’s visits, medication, and food…. but all those are also luxuries.

Health care should NEVER have to be a luxury

@Hypocrisy_Central Quite so. And outside of the US, many consider it a basic human right. But the greatest nation on Earth is so great and luxurious that even human rights are luxuries.

I basically view this question as, “What life necessities are you willing to give up in order to afford other life necessities?”. As 98% of my driving is either to work, to get food, or for medical care, I do not see vehicle ownership as a luxury. Maybe if you have a fancy car or a personal fleet, but one basic car per working adult is pretty much a minimal requirement. If you are lucky enough the get the work schedules to line up right, or multiple people in the household have the same employer, you might be able to get away with fewer, but like I said earlier, I personally haven’t lived near any of my jobs in a long time. (And no, moving isn’t an option; the shorter my commute is, the longer my wife’s commute is.)

Now, if I have to pay more to drive to the job that provides the insurance that makes being hauled to the ER cost only a few hundred dollars rather than over fourteen thousand dollars, then odds are that I will wind up dropping the health insurance in order to pay for driving to work to make rent in the first place.

If one really wanted to reduce the amount of traffic and the number of cars on the road, mass transit won’t help much. Half of all Americans have commutes longer than 10 miles each way. Seattle has it a bit worse You can’t tackle this issue with transportation changes; you need fundamental changes in how employment and residency work. Maybe arcologies where everyone works “at home”... though that has it’s own issues.

Working from home means you are always at work.