There are tires and tires, though. Whatever rate they are taxed at, I guarantee a sporty car will run softer, faster-wearing tires than will a luxury sedan. My wife and I bought our respective cars very near the same time six years ago, and they have very similar total milage on them today - within 5%. Since then, I have replaced my tires three times while she has only replaced hers once.

By taxing tires, you would encourage people to run the hardest, longest-wearing compounds they could find. This would reduce road safety, especially in cold or wet conditions, and could even cause more damage to road surfaces and more noise pollution. People would also tend to keep their tires longer relative to their rated life, possibly to the point where they were worn beyond safe operational condition.

A million others have already posted this, but the rational suggestions are:

(1) Increase the fuel tax. Self-explainatory.

(2) If a milage tax is preferable, it can be done in software by checking milage annually when the car is registered. If there is resistance to an annual tax collection like this on the grounds that incremental taxes (at each fill-up) are easier for consumers to swallow, have an option to pay monthly or whatever instead.

Or offload the issue to the gas-station attendants who are already present at every gas station in the state - have them punch the plate number and the odo reading into a hand-held computer. There will be errors of milage and plate number, but they can be mostly caught by well-designed software (plate ABC123 was seen last week with milage 12345, but now has milage 45678 - might be a typo) and can be cross-checked at registration time.

This still has troubling aspects as a car could be pinpointed to a particular place and time, but at least it's discrete points rather than a continuous stream.

The article makes it sound like a HS diploma is some kind of magical shield against societal problems:

Dropouts are more likely to face poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Typically high school dropouts earn $19,000 a year. High school graduates earn $28,000 a year on average.
If you drop out of high school, your chances of running afoul of the law increase.

and others...

But correlation != causation. Being a tool who is likely to run afoul of the law is correlated to lack of a high school diploma, not the other way around. Capability and drive and good judgement are correlated with success, and also with surviving high school.

It upsets me when people play fast and loose with logic like this. The solution is to cure societal ills, not to encourage people to finish high school. If there were a mechanism in place to teach kids good judgement and drive, we'd end up improving graduation rates AND poverty rates, recidivism rates, drug use, violent crime, etc. Encouraging tools to finish high school will only increase the number of tools with HS diplomas.