Posted on 02/08/2019 10:51:47 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
COLUMBUS, Ohio – After just two hours of public testimony, a committee looking for solutions to Ohio’s highway funding gap found consensus on just one potential revenue source: raising the Ohio gas tax.
The panel didn’t get to the level of detail Wednesday afternoon of specifying how much the tax increase should be.
The Governor’s Advisory Committee on Transportation Infrastructure otherwise didn’t find agreement on other ways to raise money for Ohio’s road system, but additional sources of revenue could be added to a report being compiled on the group’s work.
Other ideas discussed included indexing the gas tax to construction inflation rates, assessing highway user fees on alternative-fuel vehicles, such as hybrid and electric cars, how and whether to control how local governments and the Ohio Department of Transportation use money for roads and whether Ohio needs more toll roads.
Ohio is running out of transportation funds because current 28-cents-a-gallon tax doesn’t buy as much as it did in 2005, the last time it increased. Money from Ohio Turnpike bonds has been spent or is committed to projects. Cars are more efficient and drivers buy less gas, paying less gas tax. And Ohio has borrowed against future gas revenues. All of this has created a funding gap.
The committee’s final report is being assembled by Brenton Temple, a staffer for Gov. Mike DeWine. DeWine has to get a transportation budget proposal to the legislature soon. The Ohio General Assembly needs to pass it by March 31. Temple’s report will come out sooner, and committee members were told to contact him with their ideas.
The committee met just Wednesday and Tuesday to learn about the reasons for and scope of the problem. On Wednesday, it took public testimony, and then discussed what recommendations will be made.
(Excerpt) Read more at cleveland.com ...
PING.
Now who could have seen that coming?
Maybe they should think of shortfalls the next time they decide to take highway funds and spend them on their pet mass-transit projects.
“Cars are more efficient and drivers buy less gas”
Which was your point, jacckaxxes.
How come these committees never report on the spending side of the shortfall of revenue compared to expenditures? Where does the money go? What could be axed, etc.?
Gosh Ohio can become just like California
A set gas tax, like 28 cents a gallon, eventually falls short as the federal government inflates away the value of money. For example, you have to clear a net income of nearly 1.5 times what you netted in 2000 just to break even! That said, the gas tax should be indexed to inflation.
As for other tax rates that keep rising as a percentage, like sales taxes, that really is government taking ever increasing cuts of our hard earned money. If a 10% sales tax was good ten years ago, it should be good now as everything has risen in price according to inflation. Government, however, never has enough and won’t stop eating up our wealth until we taxpayers stop them. The problem there are all the voters who believe in stealing from their neighbors simply because government makes it easy.
BTW, government and taxes are essential to a civilized society. The problem is how to restrain them from taking more than what is needed.
A set gas tax, like 28 cents a gallon, eventually falls short as the federal government inflates away the value of money. For example, you have to clear a net income of nearly 1.5 times what you netted in 2000 just to break even! That said, the gas tax should be indexed to inflation.
As for other tax rates that keep rising as a percentage, like sales taxes, that really is government taking ever increasing cuts of our hard earned money. If a 10% sales tax was good ten years ago, it should be good now as everything has risen in price according to inflation. Government, however, never has enough and won’t stop eating up our wealth until we taxpayers stop them. The problem there are all the voters who believe in stealing from their neighbors simply because government makes it easy.
BTW, government and taxes are essential to a civilized society. The problem is how to restrain them from taking more than what is needed.
I got called for a 20 minute phone survey about this. It was obviously Republican polling.
It was “push polling” in as much as it wasn’t whether or not to do the tax but was geared around what messages about it would you hate the least.
They are trying to find the message that will best justify the increase.
It is a done deal.
I’m ok with user fees paying for transportation systems. But it does get complicated around the edges. For highways, gasoline taxes miss the electric vehicles. The appropriate metric would be vehicle weight times miles travelled. Implementing that formula would require a monitoring device in every vehicle. That raises other issues. A gasoline tax is probably a reasonable proxy, but that’s subject to reconsideration if/when electrics capture significant market share.
I do not think it is a non-Conservative position to suggest that yes, the fuel taxes should be indexed to changes in the vehicles fuel efficiency. Because the tax has not been indexed that way, the user - when no change in the gas tax has been made in X years - is paying less tax per mile driven than they were with less fuel efficient vehicles.
States should go back to the year of the last fuel tax update and get the average vehicle fuel efficiency at that time. Then they can take the average fuel efficiency today and measure the percentage it represents an increase. That percentage can be applied to the fuel tax. Then, they should legislate that that same change can be done without a new law, as fuel efficiency improves.
While the tax has always been expressed as a “per gallon” tax at the time it’s charged, it has really always been an attempt to obtain sufficient revenue for the building and maintenance of the roads, and both have a per-mile and per-vehicle-miles-of-use dimension to them. Roads cost more per mile and wear and tear on them has some relationship to vehicle miles driven over them. Neither has a direct relationship to gallons of fuel consumed.
The gallons used is a stand-in for how much the vehicle is being used and that is a stand-in for how much it is “using the roads. There is nothing wrong with it, and I am opposed to the sorts of government intrusions that would come from the government collecting folks number of miles driven from their vehicles.
That intrusion is unnecessary when the per-gallon tax will work just fine, if it is adjusted for changes in fuel efficiency, provided the highway spending budgets have the right priorities to start with; because no “best” tax can succeed against bad budget priorities and political corruption in spending.
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