A tax on VMT (vehicle miles traveled) is theoretically interesting but a waste of time

Re: reporting on Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's discussion of a tax per mile driven, see "Mileage-Based Tax Idea Nixed" from the Washington Post.

A gasoline excise tax is simple to administer. You charge it per gallon. People pay it when they buy gas. The gas station owner remits the tax to the State. Then it's done.

To tax individuals based on vehicle miles traveled you have to have an account for every person who drives + rental cars, what is that, 100 million cars vs. about 115,000 gasoline stations, of which more than 80,000 are convenience stores. So that's 115,000 tax accounts if you charge an excise tax on the sales of gasoline vs. 100 million accounts necessary for charging a tax per mile driven. Plus you need real-time GPS and the communication of that data to the state, and extremely robust accounting, collection, and clearance mechanisms.

Why spend all the time and money (it sounds like Hillary Clinton's health insurance plan, very convoluted) when you can just increase the gasoline excise tax, but significantly rather than piecemeal?

Just because the technology exists to get all complicated doesn't mean that it's worth doing.