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
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.