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To: Koblenz
In an ideal world, taxes collected from cars (either by mileage or by gasoline taxes, plus tolls) would be used to fund construction and emergency services for the highways. None of this money could be applied to the general budget.

Here in the "workers paradise" of Wisconsin we had a gas tax which was placed in a "highway trust fund" to facilitate infrastructure repairs. The fund grew over the years to $100,000,000 and some genius in Madison floated a bill to subsidize the urban bus system in Racine by $1,000,000. After all, it was only 1% of the trust. The next year Milwaukee lobbied for and got a $10,000,000 subsidy for the County Transit Authority. This went on for several years with ever larger withdrawals. Eventually someone noticed the overall declining nature of Wisconsin highways and bridges and suggested it was time to undergo some repair work. They looked into the cookie jar and the "highway trust fund" was completely depleted. (No big surprise, that!) The answer that Madison proposed was to increase the gas tax, meanwhile bus riders all over the state were paying $0.50 for a ride.

The moral of this little story is: "Never trust a politician with a trust fund."

Regards,
GtG

70 posted on 07/06/2006 1:55:49 PM PDT by Gandalf_The_Gray (I live in my own little world, I like it 'cuz they know me here.)
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To: Gandalf_The_Gray

Basically the same thing happened in OK.......


77 posted on 07/06/2006 2:00:41 PM PDT by Osage Orange (It's an easy game...this business of making money.)
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