This piece by Daniel DiMartino at RealClearPolicy sounds a number of themes near and dear to my heart:
In the wake of a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that revealed that federal highway spending could face a 30 percent cut after 2021, Democrats and Republicans are rallying together around infrastructure. Many members of Congress now agree on raising the gas tax or indebting the nation to pay for increased infrastructure spending. Meanwhile, President Trump has endorsed a gas tax increase to pay for his $200 billion infrastructure plan. But Congress should not pass some massive spending bill to try and solve America’s infrastructure problem — it should empower states to fix it themselves, and drastically reduce the federal role in highway funding.
Just to enumerate a few…
- The federal government has a legitimate role in genuinely interstate travel, e.g. bridges across rivers that border states. It does not have a legitimate role in commuter roads or transport.
- People are more likely to make prudent judgments when they foot the bill themselves.
- Lower federal taxes could create more “head room” for increased state and local taxes.
- The experience in some states, e.g. Missouri, clearly demonstrates that people are willing to tax themselves to pay for things that they want.
- Centralizing decision-making infantilizes state and local governments.
- The Mass Transit Account is just one of the thousands of ways in which suburban and rural Americans subsidize citydwellers.
As me auld mither used to say we can afford anything we want but we can’t afford everything we want.
Federal gasoline taxes are supposed to go into the High Trust Fund, but Congress treats the monies as general revenues and diverys the gas tax to other activities. It would be interesting to learn just how much gasoline tax revenue there is.
An easy source of infrastructure funds would be the bloated Defense budget. Take a few hundred billion from that pile.
Here in Colorado we had two infrastructure ballot measures in the November election – one would have authorized borrowing (bonds) for road projects and the other would have authorized a tax increase to pay for roads. Voters nixed both of them, 60-40 percent.
There is a new ~$500 million expansion project on I-25 to add new lanes, but to afford the construction cost it’s going to be a toll/express lane. A lot of people complained about that, but the numbers are what they are – there’s no other way to fund the project without additional revenue or sacrificing a project somewhere else.
Seems the wider and better the highway, the further out people build and live and commute. And then in a few years that wide freeway is clogged too, requiring another lane or two. But I think the post was “who decides?”
Everyone in Ne. knows gas tax is a nickel lower in Iowa, but we only have about 2M people to Iowa’s 6M. So we need federal dollars, especially for I-80, so the rest of you can zoom thru to Colorado. I guess it something you know you need to fund, but would rather not, until the pppotholes get too bad.
That’s the perfect example of my point. New highway construction is largely paid for using federal dollars. Maintaining highways is largely the responsibility of state and local governments. People are profligate with money other than their own.
That’s pretty good, Dave. All but point 5 in some fashion and degree got reflected in comments. I do have to say that perhaps one of the good things IL (and some other states, especially contiguous states) have done is get the open road tolling in place. FL does same. VA, where my daughter is, still hasn’t gotten the message. The tolls booths are like something out of Sonny’s killing in The Godfather.
Gather that many tax phobic R’s down South are also considering gas tax increases to fund new roads. The road builders, retail trade, tourism groups can be quite persuasive on the state level. going to be a mess to watch.
Walt – but that’s where to put the debate, the state level. Further, I’ve not seen a better method of imposing the costs of usage on the users than open road tolling.
Should be except for access roads to federal property and a zillion other things that come up (e.g. sections of highway to be used as military air strips, etc).
What is interesting is that even the no new taxes forever/cut state spending to bleeding bone crowd is getting into the act.