What in the world is the state of Arkansas up to here?
State government finally got the gumption to pass a reasonable tax increase (Act 416) to fund state highway maintenance and improvement by some $31.2 million the first year, with much larger figures for years after 2020.
Kudos! We love good roads!
Then, just to prove we are still in Arkansas, it tacked on an additional tax on cars designed, sold, purchased, and used in ways intended to be more friendly to the environment, including roads, than GoBaby, my 2004 GMC 4X4 or the Geezer Wagon, my 2006 Toyota Tundra: $100 per year for hybrids, $200 per year for all electrics.
Not real sure what the reasoning is here, but it might have something to do with "fairness"--my 2013 Ford Fusion hybrid gets more than twice the gas mileage as my GMC, so it's only fair that my Fusion ought to pay a little catch-up tax.
Or something like that.
Trouble is, according to a Sunday front-section story in a recent Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, state Sen. Terry Rice, R-Waldron, who wrote the bill, says it will only cost the average car owner $15 to $30 a year.
Not this average car owner.
Even if my hybrid gets three times the mileage as my GMC, under the new tax, I'm already paying extra tax at the pump, say $10 a year. Plus $100 at registration. For a total of $110, more or less, just for the hybrid. That's three to seven times as much as Senator Rice assures me I'll have to pay. If I owned a fully electric car, it would be six to 12 times as much. As far as I can tell, the only thing I get for my money is the privilege of having my name on the title of a hybrid vehicle that actually gets about the same gas mileage as many, many four-cylinder cars built in the last few years, none of which are being assessed a tax penalty for their fuel efficiency.
Heck, maybe it's not a privilege. Maybe it's a punishment.
When the law was making its way through the Legislature, I believe the figure quoted for the hybrid/electric tax yield was about $2 million to $3 million per year. So if the tax didn't exist (and it should not exist), we'd have a little north of $29.2 million in 2020, with a lot more in later years, to fix the potholes and broken pavement--$29.2 million seems like a lot of money to me, and the loss of the hybrid/electric tax revenue doesn't seem too much to get rid of a profoundly wrongheaded tax.
Act 416, according to the Democrat-Gazette story, is tied to a much larger move by state government to make the half-cent sales tax permanent by constitutional amendment in 2020. This move will generate hundreds of millions of dollars, many of them for roads, making the hybrid/electric tax an even more insignificant part of the whole than it already is.
As it stands, the hybrid/electric tax's most significant accomplishments are to severely penalize a small class of taxpayers for owning the wrong kind of vehicles, to discourage people from purchasing highly efficient hybrid/electric vehicles, and to make people mad--leading them, as it has led me, to be even less inclined to think of state government as either fair or representative.
With the state constitutional amendment campaign coming and with so much money in play, I'd think this might be the last thing state government would want to do.
From where I stand, nothing about the tax on hybrid and electric cars is either smart or fair. It seems to me to be really, really dumb in so many ways, and I can't imagine it being OK to arbitrarily tax some Arkansas citizens much, much more for the same service and then to expect them to believe this is "fair."
I just hope someone at the state Capitol or in the attorney general's office wakes up, figures it out, and saves the state the cost of a lawsuit, which is surely coming from somewhere in this small-tax, small-government red state.
------------v------------
Chuck Anderson lives in Little Rock.
Editorial on 10/11/2019