'miles driven' tax

[LastVoter]

I think a moratorium on construction of suburbs would be a better idea.

[LastVoter]

Or a luxury tax on overly big new cars.

[LastVoter]

Or a luxury tax on overly big new cars.

There is one, it's called the Gas Guzzler Tax, stupidly it doesn't include SUVs, which is why they are everywhere now-a-days and a big reason why big cars are no more.

If you really want to help the environment when it comes to cars, the absolute BEST thing you could do is get more of the ill maintained older cars off the road.  Not your uncle's 65 Mustang that he only drives 3 times a year.  The 78 LTD driven by that grandma that lives down the street is the problem.  One of those dumps more crap in the air than a 100 new cars.  Give her a few grand to trade it in on something a little more modern and we'd help a lot.

(not that car pollution is a huge issue overall anymore)

Well the goal here is to decrease fuel consumption not pollution since US mostly has that covered. Since it's very possible we will not be able to replace oil in next 10 years as the demand rises. Of course that would hurt the American manufacturer etc...

[LastVoter]

Increasing efficiency means smaller cars and newer cars, it would still be helpful to get grandma out of her old Ford.  But yes, if you want less gas used, the best way to do that is raise the price of gas.  End the subsidies, increase the tax, let the market do it's thing, let OPEC do what they want without putting pressure on them over the price of oil.  (we could and should still put pressure on them over their human rights abuses)

Well the other point is to not make the tax regressive, which would be best by taxing luxury vehicles with low mpg(<25), since working class is a lot more likely to buy used cars. Throw an $5k tax on any new truck or SUV, and you probably have the same effect as having a .50-.75 cent tax per gallon(depending on how long the car lasts). Of course this could backfire if the working class decided to pay more for used trucks or SUV's and/or grandma's demand doesn't decrease for the new ford. tl; dr need to do public research on how they would consumer act to a new tax.

[LastVoter]

That's going to be hard (if not impossible) to get passed into law.  Maybe you'd have a chance if you put in some loopholes to the truck tax for farmers, construction workers and such.  Nobody needs an SUV unless you go off road frequently and need to carry covered cargo or people while you do it, you'd basically kill that market (something I'd like to see happen, but not this way).  And like I said earlier, there already is a gas guzzler tax on vehicles (<22.5mpg I think....confirmed).  You could probably get away with raising that number up to 25.  There is also the CAFE tax on car makers, but that has had less than stellar results as well.  From wiki

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The SUV is the main reason for the decline in avg mpg since 1987.  Americans like big cars.  Because the Gas Guzzler tax doesn't effect trucks/SUVs, the people that like big vehicles have moved on to them (mainly SUVs).  So you're correct to aim your proposed legislation at them, if only there was a way to aim it so that it didn't hit the people that actually use these vehicles for their intended purpose and only hit the trendy douchebags that need a new Yukon because their neighbor just got one.

(if you can't tell, I freaking hate SUVs and other tall vehicles, especially when a 110lb soccer mom tries to park one)

Yea I hate SUV's too, although that's a bit hypocritical because I want to buy a Subaru Outback(26 mpg). So I'm guessing the reason for the loophole in gas guzzler tax is that GMC/Ford lobbied Obama to keep SUV's/Trucks untaxed?
Personal car opinions aside, if you want to change someone's behavior you have to nuke it from orbit. Stopping suburb construction in big cities is an obvious one(I am at least one household member who commutes to the city which has over 1mil in csa in a suburb drives 50 miles round trip per day, so that's a solid 12k miles  they put in just commuting every year), and this would probably not be so regressive. Gas tax is another one, which would be pretty regressive and no concern for the poor. I think taxing new SUV's/Trucks and writing tax breaks in when appropriate moderate heroish option, that wouldn't really result in a behavior change, just the amount of gas used(still a good thing), and could make American cars competitive in other regions of the world again. Right now sin taxes that are prohibitive are only for cigarettes, and booze in some places, both very regressive for obvious reasons. I think that freezing all suburb construction would be worth considering if you are pretty confident that gas prices will spike $8-9 gallon over one summer from natural causes like they did in '07(but baseline was lower at that point), because at that point the suburbs will become deadweight/China status. This would mean as much as $3-5k expenses for gas, double food prices, and utility bills going up unless you live in a geographically favored area for alternative energy.  Rural areas could mitigate the second one by producing their own food, and are more likely to be favored for the third one, urban areas can potentially handle the first ones, and in very few cases the third one. Either way it would be a second great depression, depending on how peak oil happens. The best case scenario is the current plateau of oil production continues to slowly decline and keeps the prices rising steadily at about 50 cents per year for a few years giving a wake up call to Americans before oil production accelerates it's drop. Even if you are completely optimistic about our ability to adapt/extract unextractable oil we will at least see another recession.