Jul 24 2009
You Might Be Surprised Who’s Speaking Out in Favor of A Gas Tax Increase
Then again, you might not. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has emerged as one of the leaders in the fight to increase the pot of money available to build and maintain the nation’s highways, bridges and transit systems. This is surprising because the right-leaning business group is usually the sort of group to oppose a tax increase. However, in supporting a gas tax increase – something that hasn’t happened at the federal level since the late 1980s – the Chamber is recognizing that not funding these improvements ends up costing us more in other ways: wasted time, wasted fuel, damage to vehicles, etc. The Texas Transportation Institute and others have put numbers on these “hidden taxes” and they turn out to be quite substantial, and more importantly to businesses, far less predictable than a traditional tax. At a time when everyone needs to squeeze a bit more out of their dollars, this predictability factor becomes very important. And much of the “revenue” from these “hidden taxes” evaporates, in the form of pollution, rather than being funneled back into maintaining and improving the system as a traditional fuel tax would be.
The Transportation Construction Coalition (of which ASCE is an active member), one of the more “usual suspects” in the fight for improving the nation’s transportation infrastructure is leading the charge against a lengthy delay in reauthorization of federal transportation legislation with a new ad campaign directed towards decision-makers in Washington, D.C.
If you haven’t already, let your lawmakers know that delaying the transportation authorization will not help improve the nation’s poor infrastructure conditions. Visit ASCE’s “Click & Connect” with Congress advocacy website to draft your personalized message to your lawmakers.
In addition the profession should go after the legislatures in the media. The public should be reminded that state gasoline taxes were sold to the public as being necessary to allow the state to maintain roads and bridges. In most states when the public wasn’t looking the legislatures shifted this funding stream into the general fund. This is pretty much what has happened in most of the mid-Atlantic states.
State DOT’s are forced to beg the legislature for the funding to make repairs to roads and bridges. Since bridges and roads do not vote, they go begging for funds. There are many bridges today that are rated in poor condition that will see little or no money spent on them due to the lack of funding. Unfortunately this pattern of the legislatures depriving the DOT’s of funding predates the present economic malaise.
If the DOT’s kept these funds, our roads and bridges would be in better shape today and the costs of the state departments of transportation would be self funded and not a drag on the budget. With a predicatable funding stream they could even finance expansion of the road system with bonds redemable against the tax revenues. No longer would states like New York have to increase the states debt with one shot bond issues.
The irony of the situation is that when a bridge fails the politicians run in front of the cameras denouncing the situation when they are actually accomplices to the act of what amounts to criminal negligence.
We have to continue to keep before the public this deplorable situation, and no matter how much it hurts put the blame on the parties responsible including the politicians!