Not actually true....

"Real" wages have been stagnant. Real wages are your wages adjusted for inflation, though. Nominal wages (ie, not adjusted for inflation) have continued to climb. The stagnation is that these wages haven't been rising enough to keep up with inflation.

If you have 2% inflation, and a nominal…

So charge trucks more and the costs will trickle down to those that benefit.

That is only state level funds you're considering. Local funds pull that strongly back in the other direction. The state doesn't pay for anything but state routes (a minority of all roads).

True... but you don't need to track every route and destination, just miles travelled. Doing this securely shouldn't be a problem...

Well that's better... but still a flat fee is stupid - mileage based fees are much more rational.

1) I simply corrected you claiming that they bet their own money. They don't. They bet someone else's money.

2) Apart from that, the game is rigged. The people receiving the funding are doing all the work, yet VC comes in and takes the reward because they have money and (sometimes) connections. Apart from that,…

Except any flat fee is absurd. A vehicle that doesn't move incurs no costs to the roads. Flat fees don't impact high mileage drivers - they impact LOW mileage drivers.

And since when can you not reliably track distance traveled? We've had odometers as standard equipment on nearly every single vehicle built for over…

If I were king, I'd slap an immediate $0.50 / gal tax on fuels - $0.25 of which would go to repair the highway trust fund. The rest? I would take it, and at the end of the year, the entire chunk would get divided up by the number of people working at least half time and over the age of 18 in the US plus half those…

No. flat fees per mile? Sure. But flat fees regardless of miles driven is just plain dumb. You end up with results where you're taxing compact hybrids more per mile than full size trucks when you impose a flat fee regardless of mileage.

$100/yr? I thought VA's $64 was absurd.

$100 is downright criminal. If I bought a Prius in WA and drove my usual 6500 mi per year, I'd be paying MORE in taxes and fees than if I drove a new F-150...

Bull.

All fees and taxes together in NC still only raise 59.6% as much as that state spends on its roads.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoli…

Not even close.

On average, all tolls, registration fees and taxes provide enough revenue to only cover 50.4% of all state and local spending on roads in the US.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoli…

Higher registration fees are mind blowingly stupid. A per-mile fee based on the weight of the vehicle would make sense.

When states impose registration fees for EVs and hybrids, they generally don't do the math to determine the impact of them.

Take Virginia - they lowered their gas tax and then slapped on a $64…

Of course "truck driver" is now the most common job in most states. Try fighting that lobby.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/20…

Realistically, though, I agree - rail is so ridiculously fuel efficient compared to trucks... we just have to get off the obsession with just-in-time delivery of everything.

It's nice to see that you finally seem to agree that VCs aren't investing their money, they're investing someone else's and taking the profits.

Here's the rub - even if you "stop raiding it", we're already spending far more on roads than we're collecting in gas taxes. The federal government spends about $10 billion per year more on roads than they collect in gas taxes. States and local governments rarely collect even half of what they spend on roads in the…

Is it voluntary? Sure. However, the point remains that they're gambling with someone else's money but claiming essentially all the profits.

Actually, it wasn't very likely at all that it would have happened. The amount of money spent on many of these facilities was mind blowing and amounted to, quite literally, building a new plant from scratch. It could have happened anywhere, and with Ford's cost of capital as high as it was, there was likely no way…

It was such a bad look (especially before an election year), that the Department of Energy just stopped giving people loans, which is why there's $16.6 billion left. The DOE says they're about to start rolling out more loans but... should they be allowed to?

Not really.

Most VC firms take money from other people and "manage" the investments, putting very little of their own money at risk. However, they take a large percentage of the equity and profits, if any come... so risk someone else's money and take the profits but don't risk much of anything themselves.