NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel 909
mdsolar writes "The News and Observer reports on an Charlotte, NC driver who has been fined $1000 for not paying a fuel tax when he fills his tank with vegetable oil. Perhaps the funniest quote is this one: '"With the high cost of fuel right now, the department does recognize that a lot of people are looking for relief," said Reggie Little, assistant director of the motor fuel taxes division. "We're not here to hurt the small guy, we're just trying to make sure that the playing field is level."' Sure, since the field is so plainly tilted against Arab oil interests."
Fair enough (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is... (Score:3, Interesting)
I few options might be to allow home-fuelers to purchase a license (cheap), and be expected to pay more on the yearly state taxes. The license would allow the state to put the tax payment on the honor system (sort of like Michigans' expectation that people will report how much stuff they bought over the internet, and pay the appropriate state taxes on it), with some sort of check. Perhaps a random checking of X percent of the licensees state tax return, and go after the people who didn't pony up. Even go so far as to keep it (relatively) friendly, offer them the chance to pay the extra, no penalty, no crime, if they pay, subject dropped, if not, get mean. By keeping it friendly, there would be the hope of more people switching, get enough people using home-fueling, and then you can start selling licenses for fuel stations, providing alternative fuel(s), and charging the state fuel tax per-gallon, and phase out the licenses at that time.
While I don't know about the laws here in Michigan regarding this sort of thing, I know they've been floating the idea of doing away with the gas tax, and instead raising the sales tax. The thinking being that this would get visitors from out-state paying a bit more, so even if they don't fill up, they're still paying (some) towards the roads they drive on...
looking for that hole... (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at this, I have to assume such is occuring. Perhaps he's supposed to...no, that doesn't make sense. Maybe he...no, not that either.
Ok, I give. What am I missing? How in the heck does this actually make sense? I'm generally the one laughing at the conspiracy nuts, and explaining what the news left off that shows that BigBrother isn't actually hell-bent on making your life, specifically, a living hell. You're not so important that it's worth it to go out of the way to monitor every move you make, every call, every email, every purchase, to the nth degree.
All that withstanding, what the heck? Where's the hole I'm missing?
Fair's Fair (Score:5, Interesting)
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No Joke! Rent solar power and fix your electric rates for 25 years: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
What about electric cars? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not fair. (Score:4, Interesting)
The tax is for road usage, not petrol usage.
This is true but charging the biodiesel user hardly "levels the playing field" and the punishment is silly. Big oil people have far greater resources for figuring taxes owed and paying them. If the state wanted to be fair, they could have figured the taxes for him and demanded payment. Slapping him with a fine in excess of what's owed is only something that should be done if he used the kind of scam accounting big oil companies use.
Something stinks and it's not biodiesel.
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fair enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fair enough (Score:5, Interesting)
If the system of taxing based on gas is broken, fix it - though at this stage of the game the number of people driving with something other than normal fuel is so low it's hardly worth worrying about.
It would cost more to pass and enforce the law, make a system for recieving funds from the fuel etc than they would make on it. If the number became high enough there would be a distribution system in place (vegetable oil at the pump) which could effectively tax it.
Nevermind that growing crops to create fuel oil has so many environmental problems that it shouldn't even be considered at this point.
I meant to link you to this (Score:3, Interesting)
But algae is still your friend [unh.edu].
Re:looking for that hole... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's quite simple. The state wants tax dollars to pay for roads. All cars drive on roads... even bio-diesel cars... from the article:
The unfortunate truth is that governments tend to react slowly and tend to not be very smart. This poor guy is
Why this happened... (Score:3, Interesting)
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
Apparently, the inspectors were looking for people with diesel-engined RV's that may have had dyed diesel fuel (which is not taxed, or taxed at a lower rate than automotive diesel, and is generally used in farm vehicles) in their tanks. They may have also been checking for the use of Low Sulfur Diesel, which is illegal for use in MY2007 diesel engines (which require Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel).
The race mentioned appears to have been a NASCAR event, which makes you wonder why state inspectors might think that farm diesel might end up in road vehicles there...
I myself didn't know that there *was* such a thing as "illegal diesel fuel" until I read this article.
OTOH, this is a ridiculous case that ought to be throw out of court. Just another case of overzealous law enforcement officials tossing their weight around.
He got off lightly, too. (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming that there's no wholesale price for used frying oil, and that you use 10 gallons in a week, your bond is $6,000 and your tax bill is $7,839, giving you a total cost of $13,839
All things considered, he got off lightly. He could have been ordered to pay the full costs outlined above (although probably at the wholesale price of cooking oil), plus fines for non-payment of the various bonds, plus a fine for non-payment of taxes.
Do I agree with these kinds of charges? No friggin' way! You want to talk about encouraging innovation, well innovate THIS, North Carolina - there will be no Hewletts or Packards or Jobs or Wosniks in a place that makes any kind of innovation totally unaffordable. If the best a startup can afford is a garage, what is the point in charging them in taxation more than everything they posses combined? It's a great way to kill the real doers in the world.
The same goes for any other State that inflicts taxes greater than the value of that which is being taxed, and doubly goes for Britain where common law and common sense are supposed to take precedence over civil and criminal law. (That fact has been used many times in appeals, and is probably the only notable achievement British justice has, but it's probably one of the greatest achievements of any legal system.)
Ask a long-haul Trucker about NC taxes! (Score:1, Interesting)
So imagine you're a long-haul trucker, traveling thousands of miles on one trip. What do you do? You buy fuel where's cheap, filling both 100-gallon tanks to the top. IOW, you don't buy gas in states where it's expensive, you just drive straight through. What does the state of NC call this? Yep, you guessed it: "fuel tax evasion!" That's right. They even have checkpoints set up on the highways to measure the amount of fuel in a big rig's tanks and THEY FINE THE TRUCKER FOR THE TAXES HE WOULD HAVE PAID if he were stupid enough to buy NC's overpriced fuel.
By the way, everyone was outraged about "Big Oil's OBSCENE profits" last year. Get this: Exxon makes about $0.06 profit per each gallon of gasoline sold. That's after discovery, drilling, transport, refining, and delivery to retail. The State of NC takes 10X that much (about $.57 per gallon) for doing nothing.
Re:Correction: NC Man Fined For Using NC Roads (Score:2, Interesting)
but a tax on gas is not a tax on road use. It's a tax on gas. No matter what mileage you get, you pay the same tax per gallon -- the tax is on the GAS.
If you get 30mpg, do you pay 3 times the tax per gallon as someone who gets 10mpg? No. You pay the same per gallon, because the tax is a tax on gas. Not on road usage.
It's FOR road usage, but it's ON gas.
Basically, they have no leg to stand on here. There's no tax on homemade biodiesel. He's not evading paying any taxes. Is he not paying any tax to fuel his vehicle and use the roads? Sure isn't. Good thing using the road is free, and it's the gasoline and diesel at the pump that's taxed to pay for the roads.
Re:Hell hath NO fury (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Over here in Sweden (Score:2, Interesting)
Incidentally in the Fuel Tax protests in the UK, I found out that something like 75% of the cost of fuel is tax. In which case a couple of possibilities occur to me.
One is that biofuel should have a low tax to increase usage but the tax should increase to in the long run the government doesn't lose too much cash. E.g while they are in minority the tax should be low, gradually rising as they take over from fossil fuel, but designed to still give and incentive to switch. If you could get both political parties to agree on this, people making fossil fuel and car manufacturers would have an incentitive to help the transition in return for knowing how the government would set fuel taxes.
The other thing is that you could easily use fuel tax to regulate oil prices. So the tax would rise and fall to compensate for oil costs. If you did both of these, you'd be remarkably insulated from evil terrorist petrostates as you took steps to completely cut off their influence.
Actually given that most of EU budget is spent on subsidizing farmers to grow nothing and that is hard to reform, you could keep spending the money but using it to subsidize production of various biofuel crops. So basically with a bit of planning the Middle Easy can go to hell in a handbasket over a couple of decades and it makes no difference.
Re:Ask a long-haul Trucker about NC taxes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hell hath NO fury (Score:5, Interesting)
Trying to tax a product based on how it's used is absurd.
The correct thing to do here is this: Define the tax to be on gasoline / diesel sales at a gas station. If a significant portion of the population (even a couple percent) decides to get diesel automobiles and buy heating oil to fuel them, then either apply the tax to sales of heating oil too or remove the tax on diesel fuel and create a yearly tax on owning a diesel vehicle. There's no reason to worry about vegetable oil at all - there isn't a large enough supply to matter.
My point is this: Distributors should be responsible for taxes on products they sell. If a few people get similar products through different channels, that's ok - they may be fringe, or the market may be changing. Once the market has changed, the taxes should be changed to catch up. But fining people for making a non-standard market choice is absurd - in fact, it should be criminal.
Re:Hell hath NO fury (Score:2, Interesting)
Am going to be buying a scooter sometime this year to save on gas. With about every model getting 60-110 MPG...does that mean that with a 1.5-2 gallon tank...should the government rape me more???
Since my vehicle gets great mileage...having to fill up with about $4-5 every week or so...rather than the $40-100 people in their cars/SUV's...does that mean because I get more use of the road at lesser cost than others...I should pay the government for the costs they are not getting from me?
What if more & more people start using these vehicles...rather than the gas guzzlers the government is used to people driving & pay fuel taxes on?
How about those of us who live along state lines...which or both states should I be responsible for?
How about if one state does start doing this & I buy my fuel in another state which does not rape me in these taxes???
Re:Ask a long-haul Trucker about NC taxes! (Score:2, Interesting)
How exactly do they measure this? If they just open the cap and take a peek, then it might be possible to install an inflatable air bladder in the tank so that the tank can be made to look 'full' at the flip of a switch from the cab. It would probably not be too difficult to install a system like this given that most trucks are already equipped with an air system to feed the trailer brakes and truckers tend to be mechanically inclined tinkerers anyway so perhaps someone is already doing this.
Re:Fair enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ask a long-haul Trucker about NC taxes! (Score:3, Interesting)
It could be that they tax fuel in order to discourage pollution. Nothing wrong with that. Technically. Until they they start fining people for being more environmentally friendly, ofcourse. Then it suddenly stops making sense.
Re:Many states fine you for driving with heating o (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bad press for the state itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
Few people are going to hear or do anything. To bad this happened right when I was starting to think better of my state.
If you bicycle to work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So what? It's North Carolina... (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe Oregon has already piloted said program. The problem seems to be as people push for higher per mile return on the fuel it uses their revenues go down. So now they feel they should get a per-mile rate instead of a per-gallon rate.
I'm a bit surprised this was tagged with humor, as it's not really funny and it's really happening to this guy and sets a precedent for other states to come after all of the folks interested in not burning oil products to make their cars move.
I'm sure we'll see some asinine proposals to add taxes to wind power generation/solar generation that is done by individuals to live off-grid or to reduce their consumption because once again with the taxes placed on the electrical usage reducing your usage of it via these methods is stripping the state of it's ability to generate revenue.
Heaven forbid the states actually reduce their output as well. There sure seems to be a lot of waste in government, at least in my experience with seeing the back end of government entities.
You might be surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
They both clearly, seriously (and humorously) claimed that writing actual letters (not e-mail) to state legislators or governors had an impact. And if they got 3-5 letters, they assumed that small number of people sufficiently motivated to write and post a letter represented a much larger number of people who felt the same way.
Maybe it's just in Minnesota or in the past, or both, but I doubt it.
Re:Many states fine you for driving with heating o (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say the roads would be worth a lot more to the first guy who'd likely be homeless without them.
Re:You might be surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Many states fine you for driving with heating o (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Many states fine you for driving with heating o (Score:2, Interesting)
Take off your aluminum foil hat, and go outside. There's really no one watching you from your neighbors bushes. The State wants their tax money. The laws may not be perfect, but they say that you need to pay money to the state to use fuel in your car.
Are fuel taxes perfect? no. They don't directly tax how much benefit you get from the roads. They also will tax you if you use the fuel in other things (although the couple of gallons of gas I use in my lawn mower every year is hardly worth mentioning). So what? What possible better solution could there be? Do you want to pay someone to read your odometer? Maybe put a tracking device in your car to see how far you go on state roads? Maybe driving habits, like frequent stops and accelerations have a lot to do with the wear and tear on the roads. Maybe you should be taxed more if you use the roads after the snow storm because your tax money goes to the snow plows to clear the path for you. Oh wait, I've got an even better idea! Why don't we just tax the gasoline so that it works out to be pretty fair 99% of the time! Excellent idea Jeff!
This article should be a warning to people to make sure they are within the tax laws when they use bio diesel. But of course, on slashdot, everyone wants to bring up their ideas to change the friggin world! Oh well, that's really why I read it anyways.