BIKE: Proposed law for $5 MB set aside

[Patrick Goetz]

Chuck_Thomas wrote:
> Yeah, but it's not fair.  Someone on a $2,000 super bike is consuming
> the same amount of bike roadway resource as I am on my $100 clunker. The
> % method would ask expensive bike owners to pay more for the same amount
> of resource consumed.


[Now that we've determined that a $5 tax on bikes will indeed save the 
world, as environment-trashing mountain bikers morph into docile bicycle 
commuters before our very eyes, maybe it's appropriate to chime in here.]

I think that this depends on one's definition of fair.  I'm guessing Ms. 
Gray's definition of fair is in terms of ability to pay rather than in 
terms of consumption of resources.  Bicycles in general consume so 
little roadway resources in comparison to cars that this metric is 
inconsequential.  On the other hand, people who buy $2000 bicycles by 
definition have a lot of expendable income, hence can easily afford to 
pay a higher tax than someone who is barely able to afford an $80 
Walmart bike.

You might counter that just because someone is *able* to pay more, 
doesn't mean that they *should* be forced to pay more, and that forcing 
them to pay more is *unfair*, but this (very prevalent argument) is also 
*incorrect* and demonstrates a lack of understanding of how money works. 
  Since this is a bicycle and not an economics list I won't go on about 
this, but suffice it to say that money's ability to make more money 
makes it a strong attractor in a dynamical systems sense, and the only 
way to counteract this effect (i.e. prevent all the money from ending up 
in a small number of places) is to lessen the force of attraction by 
removing some of it from the pile that is accumulating (and put it back 
into the social system that allows it to accumulate in the first place).

But if you insist, I would say that a $2000 bike frequently does consume 
more resources than a $100 bike, since the $100 bike will generally be 
used for knocking about town, while a lot of $2000 bikes are used for 
mountain biking, which severely damages natural ecosystems and trails. 
Since the money is going to be spent on trails, one might even argue 
that only mountain bike sales should taxed, and perhaps at a rate 
comensurate with the cost of the bike (for reasons of economic fairness).

Some bike shop owners (unnamed) are eager to see poor people purchasing 
bikes for basic transportation be forced to subsidize the construction 
of more trails so that they can sell more $2000+ mountain bikes to the 
people who will be using these trails.  I'm guessing that these same 
shop owners would be screaming bloody murder if the cost of this tax is 
placed squarely on these same high-dollar mountain bikes rather than 
being just another tax on the poor, thus hurting rather than helping 
their sales.  Just my cynical guess.