User fees beyond what the community currently pays in fuel tax are not justified and could be counterproductive.
In many ways, Mr Sarkozy's new tax is more of a fuel tax than a real carbon tax.
Like a toll on a bridge or a fuel tax or social security, there are some good examples, but not many.
Road investments have felt the effect of motorists driving less and using more fuel-efficient cars, which cut into fuel tax revenues.
Short of that, buyers are essentially imposing a fuel tax upon themselves, a nontrivial fee paid as a matter of conscience.
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But how these new plans will fare as voters demand cuts in national fuel tax revenues is at best an open question.
If they want to argue that general aviation should pay more, fine, they can make a case for raising the fuel tax.
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Taxes on products include value added tax (VAT), excise, fuel tax, etc.
Formed in April, the group favors an increase in fuel tax instead, because the administrative costs of implementing user fees are too high.
One example: fuel tax (which is levied by the feds and augmented by the states) alters the financial decision of commuting by car.
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Fuel tax is set by most of India's states at 28%, whereas in much of the rest of the world aviation fuel is untaxed.
Current charges of fuel tax and road tax would be scrapped.
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Also, railroads don't pay as much fuel tax as trucking companies.
This was largely used to pay for a cut in expected revenue from petrol and diesel prices, as he pulled back on forecourt fuel tax levels.
Meanwhile, in the UK, some 300 lorry drivers demanding a fuel tax rebate blocked a major route into the capital during the morning rush hour in protest.
The fact that the wheels have come off the government's fuel tax policies so disastrously this week emphasises the need for a fairer, less crude method of taxing motorists.
Mr Osborne scrapped the annual fuel tax escalator - a mechanism under which duty rose by 1p above inflation every year - and cut fuel duty by 1p in March's Budget.
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Airlines are exempt from emissions laws now and pay no fuel tax, and whereas demand for cars and electricity is predicted to grow only slowly, demand for flying is forecast to rise hugely over the coming decades.
That bill would increase the general aviation jet fuel tax from 21.8 cents per gallon to 30.7 cents per gallon and would raise the general aviation gasoline tax from 19.3 cents per gallon to 24.1 cents per gallon.
Among them: enactment of a national speed limit of 65 miles per hour, freight industry participation in an Environmental Protection Agency program to reduce fuel consumption, and a reduction of highway congestion by raising the fuel tax if necessary.
Thanks to pricey fuel and tax incentives, car and van mileage has fallen for four consecutive years and fuel efficiency has increased, notably because new cars have better engines.
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In the late 1990s, the fuel-tax escalator made rising taxes on motoring a nice little earner for the Treasury.
There are three possible options for replacement of the fuel-tax escalator.
This week's abandonment of the fuel-tax escalator did not represent a shift to a fully thought-through new approach to transport taxation of the kind advocated by Mr Begg.
He told a recent group of visitors that the fuel-tax escalator might have run its course, pointing out that the all-party consensus which had once sustained it had now collapsed.
It found the UK has some of Europe's cheapest fuel prices before tax.
Some of the issues that need to be addressed, he says, are the lack of any tax on aviation fuel, fiscal incentives for alternative-fuel vehicles, and the need for a carbon tax to replace the government's ill-directed climate-change levy.
The manifesto confirms its ambitions on tax: for a lower 10p starting rate of income tax, for a cut from 8% to 5% in value-added tax on fuel, and for no increase in the 23p basic rate nor the 40p higher rate of income tax.
Governments must also be careful not to fuel housing booms with tax breaks.
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