[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Full report: Transforming Surface Transportation Reauthorization (6/10/19).

PING.

[SauronOfMordor]

Better yet, stop federal has tax funds being stolen for purposes other than road maintenance.

[Hugh the Scot]

Filled with bad ideas. User fees will never “replace” existing taxes. Taxes never go away.

It’s also another way to force the rest of us to subsidize those in congested cities.

[exDemMom]

Yet, much of the Interstate system, construction of which began in the 1950s, is nearing the end of its functional life, along with the infrastructure of other surface transportation modes. Over the next two decades, trillions of dollars of investment will be needed to rehabilitate and in some cases rebuild this infrastructure, according to some estimates.

I do not understand. Every time I drive on an interstate, it has a construction project going on. How can it be about to crumble when it is always being repaired? Some of the state roads, on the other hand, are falling apart. This includes portions that substitute for portions of the interstate.

[mountainlion]

The largest freight corridor is the Mississippi river. Build in this corridor every flood will wipe out infrastructure?

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks so much for your support to this point... I personally apprecaite it...
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President Donald J. Trump and the Free Republic of the United States of America
President Donald J. Trump's address to the United Nations on 09/19/2017.

Ramirez political cartoon:  Google LARGE VERSION 06/12/2019: LINK  LINK to regular sized versions of his political cartoons (archive).
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...this is a general all-purpose message, and should not be seen as targeting any individual I am responding to...

Just $723.00 dollars to 98.00%

[spintreebob]

Which makes more sense?

1. Each state collects and spends all gas, energy and related taxes in its state. The Feds collect no energy taxes and don’t tell the states what to do or how to do it.

2. The Feds control the money and use that money to bribe states into the wet dreams of Beltway bureaucrats.

[Rumplemeyer]

Bump

[Wuli]

On one single point.

There is zero wrong with the fuel taxes generally other than their inappropriate allocation for non-road projects that the political class refuses to fund by user taxes on the other transportation systems that fuel taxes get spent on (trains and “mass transit”).

1. Fuel taxes are the least invasive legitimate proxy for miles driven. Yes, they are based on averages, so some with lousy fuel economy pay more per mile and those with great fuel economy pay less per mile. Most of those distinctions come from our own choices, so the rules use an average, instead of invading our privacy to find exactly the miles per gallon, or miles driven for each of us.

2. If fuel tax revenue declines because of greater fuel efficiency, then the actual average fuel tax paid per mile driven would not amount to an actual increase in fuel taxes paid, if the fuel tax was adjusted by the same average percentage increase in fuel economy. There is nothing “conservative” in blocking such an adjustment.

3. With proper adjustments the fuel taxes are less invasive of our Liberties now than would happen if the government could mandate turning over our mileage data on a regular basis so they could bill some mileage based tax.

Fix the fuel taxes, don’t come after our mileage data.

[Wuli]

On one point alone:

“Eliminate federal spending outside of highway freight corridors or at the very least allow federal capital funding to be redirected toward operations and maintenance activities”.

I support the first part of that statement but not the second. The states should cover operations and maintenance activities on projects completed with assistance from federal funds. The federal funds should ONLY be for the capital funding, not an ongoing “entitlement” to the states. Expanding federal funding to operations and maintenance will only detract from the federal funding on the building side.

[Wuli]

On one point:

“Motor fuel taxpayers should be reimbursed for the taxes they paid while using toll roads”

How would that work? I think it would become another costly government bureaucratic waste of money. And, why? The toll is specific to “a road”, and are they ANY users that will have not paid fuel-based taxes anyway? No. So every user of a toll road would be due a refund, or only those fuel tax payers who paid fuel taxes during the construction of the toll road, when some fuel-tax revenue may also have been contributed to getting the toll road built? The idea to me is silly. If you don’t want to use a toll road, use an alternative. If you pay the price in congestion you can pat yourself on the back for saving the price of the toll.