When you say “we” do you mean the federal government?
That would, of course, be unconstitutional, enumeration and all that.
You make a good point. Let me tell you why I have seen it different. You can make of it what you will.
My overall philosophy is that it is better to tax as close to home as possible. It’s best to have services as close to home as possible. You should be able to take someone in your state to task, to make things right. Good luck with that.
I live in California. As I understand it, New York, New Jersey, and other states have the same problems. Here are some of them.
My state over taxes and diverts the funds to their pet projects. Gas tax money winds up paying for massive mass transit programs. Massive outlays for busses, light rail, advertising... You can also toss our infamous bullet train to nowhere in.
So do our gas tax dollars got fix our state highways and roads? At times, we have an absolute drought along these lines.
Our highways in California were in terrible disrepair. They went decades beyond the time when they needed to expand highways. They would carve out lanes we needed, to come up with special high capacity vehicles. Another-words, if you and your wife were in the car, you could use the diamond lanes. If you we with a friend, you could.
I have seen four lane (one direction) freeways, three lanes of which were stopped or going about 5-20 mph, with the diamond lanes almost empty. Granted there are times when they get more business, but it’s all a big scam.
In some places they’ll allow you to pay an extra fee to drive in the lane without more than one passenger.
As I said, it’s a big fat scam. If they had opened up all the lanes to traffic, it could have moved ALL traffic up to 33% faster.
You realize how bad California is. Sound policy here is as scarce as a unicorn. Our voices are ignored. They play games and screw us over at every turn, literally.
So yes, I have advocated to keep the federal government involved with our highways.
Is that Constitutional? I don’t believe it is.
Either way it’s not working.
The feds charge gas taxes on every gallon of gas. States do on top of it.
Some small states would have a hard time keeping their roads up on their own. That is also a concern to me.
At any rate, there it is.