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2 US Senators Propose 12-Cent Gas Tax Increase
An anonymous reader writes There are several proposals on the table to stave off the impending insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund (which pays for transit, biking, and walking projects too) in two months. Just now, two senators teamed up to announce one that might actually have a chance. Senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) have proposed increasing the gas tax by 12 cents a gallon over two years. The federal gas tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon, where it has been set since 1993, when gas cost $1.16 a gallon.
Good!
a. Gas is much too cheap in the US.
b. We need a lot of infrastructure work.
Of course, I'm sure we could afford to pave all of our roads with gold, have diamond-studded bike lanes, and solid titanium sidewalks if we didn't spend half our budget on wars, but hey, I'm not holding my breath. There's not as much room for corruption in building roads in this country as there is building roads in some 3rd world country that we bombed into oblivion.
I don't respond to AC's.
Does your government also spend untold billions on illegal surveillance of the population, secret "black" prisons abroad, and wars against the personal freedoms of the citizens?
If so, then yea, it's terrible that our fuel tax is so much lower than yours. If not, well, then it's really a completely different situation.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
12 cents won't affect me one bit. It certainly won't change my driving habits. The poor on the other hand.. well, let's just say if you're living on a fixed income and/or are already below the poverty line a nice big regressive tax might sting a little...
Defund the NSA, we'll have all the money we need for roads and infrastructure. And then some.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The issue with the gas tax is that it is a fixed amount per gallon and the real value falls over time with inflation. The only way for the gas tax to keep up is to index it to inflation. Otherwise you will continue to see the Highway funds periodically getting depleted until you have to pump up the tax again. Much better to permanently index the tax to inflation rather than have these periodic increases. Of course you could argue that there are better ways to tax in order to raise transportation infrastructure funds. But if you are going to stick with the gas tax, then index it.
The government only pulled in $1,934,919,000,000 this year so there's obviously not enough to go around.
Because that would take the cost directly out of our monied overlords' pockets. Instead, this way the peasants cover almost the whole bill and the ultra-rich don't even notice the difference.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Since the gas tax is ostensibly for the construction and maintenance of roads and highways, it should be compared to that. The cost of maintenance and construction scale mostly according to CPI, not the price of gas. I can't think of any reason why you'd compare the tax to the price of gas unless you're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it needs to go up more (political arguments about energy taxes aside).
Putting $1.16 into an inflation calculator yields $1.90 in 2014 dollars, or a 64% increase. 64% of 18.4 cents is 11.7 cents. So a 12 cent increase is exactly what's needed for the tax to keep pace with inflation.
The US Government has spent over a trillion dollars funding a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 6 billion dollars funding a revolt in the Ukraine, at least 9 million dollars funding rebels in Syria (I have not looked at any numbers past what Obama did last September), Billions in beefing up US Local police forces, Billions more on DHS, FEMA, and the TSA, Billions more funding Egypt's various revolutions, and untold amounts in "black budgets" all over Africa. Even the GOA who is supposed to ensure accountability for spent tax dollars, spends millions on a lavish party for 33 people in Las Vegas.
And you think average people who's salaries and average wealth has gone down by nearly 30% in the last decade alone should pay even more money because they could not spent anything on Roads and Infrastructure whilst they pissed away your money everywhere else?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Gas is too cheap so the government must artificially raise the price.
No, infrastructure is too expensive for the funding we have in place. Gas is the best proxy we have for usage of that infrastructure so it's reasonable to tax that. More gas used means more infrastructure repairs needed and less gas used means less use of said infrastructure.
We have set aside funds for infrastructure. 18.4 cents of every single gallon of gas sold in the US! Where does that money actually go?
To maintain the infrastructure - duh. That's pretty much a matter of public record. It's a big country and we have a lot of crumbling roads. Furthermore 18.4 cents doesn't go as far as it did 20 years ago. In fact it is roughly equivalent to $0.11 cents in 1993 dollars once you adjust for inflation. Much of this infrastructure is paid for with federal dollars so it makes sense to tax it at the federal level.
Well over 25% of gas tax funds go to side walks and bike trails and shit like that.
Citation needed. That number smells like you just pulled it out from where the sun don't shine.
America, where poor people drive cars.
Gas tax increases are a good pricing signal to increase fuel efficiency (better than CAFE standards or cash for clunkers).
There are two philosophies behind taxation.
One says that taxes are a necessary evil in order to pay for the things that government does. This is what the founding fathers felt. This is the reason for gas taxes in the first place: to pay for roads built by the government.
The other says that taxation is necessary for the reduction of evil, for whatever some group currently defines as evil. You believe that the use of fossil fuels is evil, therefore the taxes should be consistently increased to force a decline in use. This is not what the gas tax was instituted for. Some people think that simple "wealth" is evil, and thus there needs to be a tax to reduce that evil.
If we had started a decade ago today we'd have an extra 50c per gallon incentive to buy a more efficient vehicle and the insolvency of the highway trust fund would be another decade plus in the future.
Some people in both camps are always surprised to learn that taxation is not a zero sum game, despite repeated demonstrations of that effect over the years. Simply doubling a tax does not double revenues from that tax. For example, the states that thought they'd pay for their health care systems by increasing the taxes on cigarettes have learned that increased price per pack has resulted in a decrease in revenue as more people stop smoking. Increasing the gas taxes will cause less use and less tax revenue, so it will be harder to pay for the things the gas tax is intended to pay for. Part of the decrease will be from people who buy electric cars that pay NOTHING for road use. And some of the decrease will be from people who simply stop driving, which makes the idea of a tax credit for the poor people just another way to redistribute the wealth. (Yes, that is exactly what a credit to reimburse someone for paying a regressive tax when they didn't pay that tax to begin with, is.)
Those in the "eliminate evil" camp should realize that "Stop smoking" would be one result, since that was their goal in supporting that tax increase. And yet it is a surprise when revenues go down when fewer people pay such taxes.
The same thing is happening with the gasoline tax. The higher the price of gas, the less of it people buy, and more electric vehicles. The less gas people buy, the less revenue from gas taxes. It is a self-defeating game, and is dishonest to start with. Usurping a tax into a social engineering tax once it is established as a "pay for services" tax is dishonest. "We need a tax to pay for ..." "Ok, now you agreed to pay for X, we should increase the tax to convince people to behave the way I want them to..."
The correct response to "highway funding is down because of lower use of gasoline" is not "increase the tax", it is "find a way to get the other users of the roads etc. to pay for their use." A milage tax on electric vehicles, for example, and a mandatory registration fee for bicycles, perhaps. But to continually increase the costs for a dwindling fraction of the users of a service is not the right answer, nor the fair answer.
A few quick calculations, for comparison:
In UK, 1 litre of petrol (gasoline) costs about 1.2 GBP. 1 US gallon = 3.7 litres, so that works out as 7.57 USD per gallon. The OP doesn't actually say what you guys pay, but I get the impression that it is less by a wide margin. The US is also, I believe, the largest economy on the planet, and you spend more energy, per capita, than any other nation in the world. Perhaps you should tighten up a bit on the way you waste energy - I assume it must wasted, because it doesn't look like all that extra energy results in higher, actual production.
I'm sorry I haven't got loads of sympathy, but it does look like a luxury problem to me. Find a way to change the situation - fix the inequalities in your society, so the poorest don't have to struggle in hopeless poverty in order to feed the indulgencies of the rich.