What happened right after 1993 that caused Congress to never raise the gasoline tax again?
Lawmakers in both parties have been reluctant to raise the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline and 24.4-cent diesel taxes that are the main sources of revenue for the Highway Trust Fund. Neither tax has been raised since 1993. In the two decades since then, inflation has driven up construction costs and the amount of revenue flowing into the fund has lagged because motorists are driving less and vehicles are more fuel efficient. The reluctance to hike the fuel taxes has left the fund constantly teetering on the edge of insolvency.
Oh, yes, that’s right. The Gingrich Revolution, followed by the complete triumph of the Grover Norquist anti-tax pledge.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has said the federal Highway Trust Fund is expected run dry by late August. Without congressional action, transportation aid to states will be delayed and workers will be laid off at construction sites nationwide, Foxx said.
To that end, the White House will spend next week highlighting the issue and pressing for action. In contrast to President Barack Obama’s 2014 goal to act without Congress wherever he can, the highway funding issue is not one he can solve on his own.
The president and vice-president will dot the country highlighting worthy transportation projects in an effort to get the Republicans in Congress to pay for the upkeep of our national infrastructure.
That this is even necessary is sad. That it might not work is scary.
A lot of people!e I know already struggle to pay for gas now.
We haven’t raised the gas tax in twenty-one years and are going to run out of money in August.
Shitty situation all around. Interestingly did you know because of the urban boom poor people are getting pushed into suburbs that were never designed with them in mind consequently walk ability tends to be quite low among other things.
Carpooling is becoming a bigger thing. Not all of us live on coasts you know.
Now my point is there are reasons people might be a hard sell no matter how urgent the situation.
There are some real structural problems that we’re all paying for now. I live in a medium sized city with minimal options for public transportation and that is essentially a prime example of a sprawling lack of thoughtful planning. Bike lanes? Forget it. Add to that almost no recharging stations for electric vehicles and one in which it is cheaper on a low to middle income to get financing for a mid-sized gas guzzler or SUV than for a hybrid or EV (got mine by getting something higher-mileage than I would ordinarily feel comfortable with), and we can see the scope of the problem. If you’re getting 10-18 mpg in the city, and filling up once a week, any increase in gasoline costs is going to hit hard. So yeah, a hard sell it is. Unfortunately, a failure to sell will probably mean a much harder economic landing the next time there is a major spike in oil prices than we would have had otherwise, and none of us is even remotely prepared for how to deal with that.
There’s a solution for that:
In other words, if poor people have trouble paying for gas, then help more poor people pay for things they have trouble paying for, including gas.
The states have. Illinois certainly has.
If so, when do they recognize that they can’t afford to own and operate a private passenger vehicle? Then demand far more cost efficient and less polluting public transport?
And what are they to do in the ensuing 20 years or so between the (doubtful at best, right out front) beginning of a “more cost efficient and less polluting public transport” and its actual realization?
Walk to work?
Get real.
I live in a city with a relatively well-functioning public transit system as far as the U.S. is concerned…NYC…and I need an automobile for about 1/3rd of my work. Maybe more. I cannot afford the needed 2 hours each way in order to get from the Bronx to say mid-Brooklyn (gotta leave time for subway breakdowns), and outside of the city? NJ, L.I. or Westchester? Another two hours each way with centralized railroads. An hour to get to Penn Station, The Port Authority bus terminal or Grand Central, another hour for a train or bus. And that’s cutting it close.
Why doesn’t the U.S. already have a public transportation system to equal most of the rest of the developed world? Because it’s more immediately profitable to build cars and trucks and more profitable to sell fuel, that’s why.
Back to the corporate-owned PermaGov.
You know.
The corporations that have funded the campaigns of both realistic candidates for president and every Senate seat for at least the last 60 years?
Get real.
AG
If that’s the case then they are really vulnerable to a major oil price shock, which hasn’t happened for a while but could happen at any time. And, honestly, if their cash flow is that tight then they are vulnerable to just about any other sudden money demand.
There are things you can do – reduce your commute, find alternate transport, switch to a more fuel efficient vehicle. I don’t know your friends’ personal situations, and perhaps they’ve already done all of those things. But most of the people I know who complain about fuel prices drive large vehicles on long commutes, and frankly I don’t have sympathy for them. It would actually be better for all of us if $1/gallon tax were added and the money used for transport – especially alternatives. This would create incentives to get people out of Ford Extinctions and to stop commuting 50 miles one way for a restaurant job.
This has the advantage of forcing Republicans to defend their refusal to act to save jobs. It’s doubly beneficial to Joe Biden since this kind of populist argumentation is right in his wheel house – it can even set the theme for his presidential campaign.
Joe Biden.
“Populist?”
Really?
Someone once widely known as “The Senator From MBNA?”
Remember MBNA? The original credit card Cookie Monster? (Since incorporated…and thus dispersed before it could be investigated…into the equally rancid Bank of America.)
MBNA. A prototypical Bank/Credit Card Pirate/PermaGov establishment.
Joe Biden.
Populist or fabulist?
A satrap of MBNA?
You be the judge.
Simultaneously a .01 percenter and a populist?
Can’t be both.
Can you?
I don’t think so.
“Populist.”
Political branding, nothing more.
Sheer bullshit.
AG
FDR was a 0.01%’er and did a half-way decent job, so it is indeed possible to be both.
Any aspiring senator from Delaware who wasn’t in fact The Aspiring Senator from MBNA would merely be a candidate from Delaware, similar to an aspiring senator from Michigan who wasn’t wholly-owned by the auto industry or an aspiring senator from West Virginia who wasn’t wholly-owned by the coal industry or a Texan bereft of big oil’s support or a Massachusetts candidate divorced from fishing and ship building. They all have local laps to sit on, some laps are just bigger than others.
That said, aside from his banking masters (and the Patriot Act), Joe’s record in the Senate was excellent. At a minimum I would love to have him compare and contrast his record against everyone else who would lay claim to the 2016 nomination – he’s not perfect (none is) but he’s got the Joe Bag-Of-Donuts thing honest, and he often talks that talk. I don’t expect a revolutionary – they don’t get elected, they get arrested…
Then I guess we’d better start getting arrested, because getting elected while in thrall to the corporate-owned Deep State does not seem to be working.
Not even a little bit.
i wish it were otherwise, Oscar. I really do. But we’re already more than halfway down a hard road and the destination looks worse than the journey.
Much worse.
Orwell couldn’t begin to imagine the power of an overarching media as it has developed post-information age. He didn’t have a clue as to how overwhelmingly effective it would be.
AG
Bottom line is….the Republicans simply don’t care. Then just let all those blue states that keep having to send their tax dollars to support those moochers in red states keep their money at home and fix their own bridges and fill their own potholes. That seems to be what Republicans want, right? We continue the slow march to second world status when it comes to our infrastructure and its support.
And living standard for an ever larger percentage of our population.
You all have it all wrong the GOP has been spreading Horse Shit for years! They just want us ALL to go back to the days of dirt roads, horses, wagons and buggies. Then the GOP can really spread more Horse Shit then ever all over this great land!
If Congress ever indexed the tax to the price of gas, they would have the fortunate consequence of being able to deal with increases in asphalt costs as well.
The failure to raise the price of gas with inflation is one of the major subsidies of the oil companies.
I guess a lot of people don’t really care if stuff like this happens, just cluck, cluck and change the channel. WTF callous society have we built?
One that has been decades in the making, unfortunately. Rebuilding it to be more compassionate, where its people feel more connected to one another and to our society at large will be a gargantuan task. Not impossible, mind you, but enormously difficult.
Offer a replacement for the gas tax: the cancelleation of the F-35 fighter. Raising the gas tax is a non-starter.
Great idea. But it will never happen. The military and arms producers are hand-in-hand with the oil people. It is military might that keeps the prices down on fuel here in the U.S., nothing else. Add Big Money financial institutions, Big Med/Big Pharma, and AIPAC to Big Oil and you can see what controls almost the entire federal government. How? No corporate money, no electoral win. It’s a no-brainer.
Fuel prices in Europe average two to three three times higher than they are in the U.S., but since the urban/suburban/ rural public transportation systems there are so much better than they are here, those economies can handle that kind of cost. If U.S. fuel prices suddenly doubled or tripled the entire economy would tank in a matter of days.
AG
P.S. Plus…think of the amount of Big Oil profit that is provided by fueling the military alone.
Navy ships, air power, a mobile military.
Colossal!!
Bet on it.
Compromise: trade the Keystone XL pipeline for an increase on the corporate tax rate – especially for big oil companies.
If you raise this issue to a wingnut the answer will be “We already pay enough taxes, what we need to do is cut spending”. By “cut spending” they mean all the $trillions that they imagine are being spent on Obama’s bro’s in the ‘hood. No really, they really think that most of their tax dollars are being spent on lazy, do-nothing minorities. Think Craig T Nelson and his bigoted, ignorant comment about how when he was on welfare and food stamps no one helped him like THOSE PEOPLE (wink wink nudge nudge) are getting helped by Obama.
Which highlights a real problem – with 24×7 cable and a ubiquitous, wireless internet our news companies somehow can never find the time to explain where the tax dollars actually go. So people have a very distorted view of reality.
The second problem is that when the GOP does spend $billions on transportation projects they are almost all road and almost all new construction. (Example: $285B national bill in 2005.) You might see a bridge replaced in a GOP project if it is necessary to add more lanes, but you won’t see a 1-of-1 replacement of an old bridge if there is no added capacity. This “policy” is more defacto than anything written, but the GOP leadership has consistently made priority choices as if all they could think about was reducing their personal commute time in the short-term.
Finally, GOP priority-setting has been very influenced by the voting behavior of the area in question, while the Dems have tried to be “fair” – thus areas like CA have received proportionally a tiny amount of the federal highway budget while states like Wyoming have terrific highways.
With a 50% increase in the per-gallon gas tax, the cost of a 12 gallon fill up would go up . . . $1.10.
Considering the fluctuations in gas prices in an area or from week to week, who would even notice?
Who would notice? MNPundit would.
This is why it won’t happen. Welcome to coalition politics.
One week, gas is $3.33, the next $3.57. It goes up to $3.82, then comes back down to $3.71. All for no apparent reason. Yeah, they say it’s because of “trouble in the Middle East” or some refinery had to shut down for a couple of days, but really, there’s no reason for the price to jump up and down the way it does. A 12 gallon fill up can go anywhere from $40 to $50, which I will warrant can be difficult for drivers to manage. But if the price goes from $43 to $44.10 due just to an increase in the federal gas tax, drivers won’t notice any difference as soon as the price bumps back down a dime a gallon, and that could happen from one week to the next.
We must get over this aversion we have to paying for stuff we want. It doesn’t work that way.
Commodities traders taking their pound of flesh.
That it
mightwill not work is scary.Fixed.