> Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?
It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.
> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices
Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.
> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
But what does that mean?
If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.
If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.
> It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state
That's your quibble?
When doing the bookkeeping on revenue flowing in against cost going out it's a simple matter to look at licence fees per annum, axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
These can be broken down to monthly or per quarter, etc.
Here we have licences that can be paid for three months, or six months, or twelve months or for three years, even so the public data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development (the federal department that oversees all the road related revenue (multiple sources), plans and funds road upkeep and extensions) talks about licence numbers per year.
The median license renewal cost in the US is around $30, for an interval of typically 6-8 years. Which is to say, less than $5/year. Subtract the overhead of the licensing bureaucracy. If the result is nonzero there's a decent chance it's because it's a negative number. In neither case is it paying for a material amount of road maintenance.
> axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
Car tax and fuel tax?
But put that to the side for a moment. Even if you had a country that collected a significant amount of revenue from driver licensing, and you inadvisably wanted to continue to collect that amount of money from that population (note: this is a regressive tax anywhere that most people drive cars), why would you need driver licensing for that instead of adding the same amount to the car tax?
It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.
> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices
Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.
> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
But what does that mean?
If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.
If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.