but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible

and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war

This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.

But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.

Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.

That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.

I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.

- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.

- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).

- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.

- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.

- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.

There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.

Great article from the Guardian.

The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly

>Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...