This does not address my post.
The answer to your post is the answer to the question i have asked.
If is it deemed civil, how does it meet the justifications for levying civil penalties?
The very nature of the pigouvian tax... Forcing people to pay more for alcohol than they do for say apples is in essence, a civil penalty on purchasing alcohol. This applies for off road diesel fuel vs on road diesel fuel, but more or less as a means of funding the highway system. And yet.......... You are being levied/taxed/fined whatever you choose to call it, for driving a truck
on the road.
The reason for a fine of any type is to discourage and/or internalize the externality the behavior associated with the act of being fined.
They put people in jail for punching other people in the mouth. Why? To deter them from punching people in the mouth.
They fine you for running a red light if you happen to get caught. Why? To keep you from running red lights.
They charge you extra for purchasing alcohol. Why? To discourage you from purchasing more.
They charge you more for "on road" diesel than off road diesel. Why? (This is where it gets tricky so please pay attention) To keep businesses from free riding. You see, when a truck drives on the road, its not a big problem. But when 30 million trucks are driving annually on the road, it tends to eat up the asphalt. There is nobody here that would deny the benefits from having trucks transporting goods, but there are those who could clearly identify a problem; the owners of those trucks are gaining much more than the consumer of which they provide the service to. This is commonly identified when social benefit < social cost, which translates into something called deadweight loss. Due to the fact that there are trucks driving on the road, there are some externalities (negative consequences associated with the partaking of an action).
These policy makers really do not know what to do about this, because repairing roads becomes expensive. So they ask economists, "what can we do."
The economist replies, "internalize the externality by
taxing the act." What happens is rather interesting. Of course, because the demand for trucking is rather inelastic (no other alternatives really), the quantity effect<price effect, and therefore the activity is not discouraged in a negative way. But.... And this is the meat of my response; the tax does in fact create a stream of revenue of which road repair is not burdened on everyone, but on those whose benefits of the road are exceeding the social benefits trucking.
We can synthesize this quite eloquently into the current heath care debate. Maybe you are not causing hospitals and other consumers to "pick up the tab" thereby increasing costs for everyone. But, there are those who do. Are we to expect the government not to tax a guy who only uses the road infrequently with his diesel truck? Of course not, the transactional costs associated with identifying that specific demographic and targeting them outweighs the both the social and private benefit gained. And the demand for medical care is probably the only good/service that can be called perfectly inelastic (the slope of the demand curve (given a specific first and second derivative) is undefined)
So if you want to engage in activity that infringes on the rights of others, you are going to have to pay a tax. Why? To discourage this type of activity and "internalize the externality".
Understand now?:2wave: