California moves closer to pay-by-the-mile auto insurance

Why should good drivers subsidize bad drivers? I mean, if you are a drunk and get in two or three collisions, in the current system your liability insurance goes through the roof (and rightly so).

Under a gas tax system, you won't pay a penny more for car insurance after your third wreck than you did before your first one. Instead, everybody else's rates go slightly up in the form of increased gas tax to pay for your bad driving.

I'm all for public health insurance because so much more of bad health is the luck of the draw. A major illness can happen to anyone. Besides, the right to live is a fundamental right in our country (ie, "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness...").

How you handle yourself behind the wheel seems much more directly correlated to how likely you are to get in a collision. It's much less random. And there is no fundamental right for people to drive that is furthered with an insurance tax. If you tend to wreck other people's cars in collisions, you should pay more in insurance. If you don't, you should pay less.

 

I would add that I could see how a gas tax to cover the illegally uninsured driver would make sense. So you are still legally obligated to carry liability insurance, but if somebody hits you and that guy doesn't have liability insurance, you can still get restitution from the state.

Hmm. Come to think of it, even there it doesn't really make sense. Why not just have the state takes all citation fees paid by people who are driving without liability insurance and put it in a special fund? That fund would then go to paying for people who are victimized by people without liability insurance.

Anyway, I've always been in favor of a gas tax. Gas should be more expensive for environmental and national security reasons. I'd like to see a "floor" built in where the tax artificially always prices gas at a minimum of $3.00 this year, $3.25 next year, $3.50 the year after that, etc. If the cost of crude suddenly skyrockets, the tax is automatically cut so that the consumer doesn't see a big spike at the pump. A steadily, slowly increasing gas price would tell the market that 14 mpg gas guzzlers are bad investments today, tomorrow and forever, without being a sudden shock.

 

doah! I misread it. Oh well.

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