1. “Gasoline taxes are an unreliable funding source for state transportation projects, road construction, and maintenance due to declining gasoline prices and more fuel-efficient vehicles.”
B.S. The intent of the user fees known as fuel taxes is to obtain from the road users a certain revenue based on road usage, and fuel usage is used as an average stand-in for road usage. It is accepted that due to differences in miles per gallon it overstates road usage for some and understates it for others, but all fees based on averages do that. There is nothing inherently bad or not “Conservative” about such user fees or how they are arranged. The problem is then NOT the fees, but the fact that they have not been adjusted for what has been happening with average fuel consumption per mile driven. Higher fuel efficiency means the same fee, on a cents per gallon basis, is not collecting as much fuel tax per average mile driven as it did before.
It would not be against Conservative principles to adjust fuel taxes based on improvements in fuel efficiency. Doing so would not change the average fuel tax paid for the average driver. What has been happening is the average driver is paying less annually in fuel taxes - nationally, in general, due to greater fuel efficiency requiring less fuel consumption - on average. The fuel taxes can be fixed to adjust them for greater average fuel consumption - when there is in fact greater average fuel consumption.
2.”Moreover, gasoline taxes are regressive and produce widespread economic consequences. Increasing fuel taxes leads to higher prices on goods and services throughout the economy. These additional costs are inevitably passed on to consumers, with an especially negative impact on lower- and middle-income families.”
MORE B.S. Any replacement of the fuel tax will simply change the means by which people and the economy will have revenue for roads extracted from them, not that they will no longer be financing the roads through some mechanism that extracts that cost from them.
3. “The main reason for inadequate transportation funding is not lack of revenue. Actually, far too many dollars are spent on projects unrelated to roads, such as rail, bike paths, and museums. “
The hypocrites then admit it is NOT inadequate funding or lack of revenue that is the problem (if true then why blame the fuel tax in the 1st place) but how dollars collected from fuel taxes are spent (on what??) and how much waste and corruption is involved when they are spent on roads.
After raising the false old bugaboo about fuel taxes they go on to make some sensible policy proposals.
Problem #1 ...
A fuel tax is not a true user fee, but it's a reasonable surrogate for one. It's allocated to the user in a way that is roughly proportional to a motorist's use of roads overall but not to any one road at any one time (an important distinction that will be seen in #2 below). A toll is a true user fee that is allocated to the user in a way that much more accurately reflects the motorist's use of specific roads at specific times. Tolls had historically lost a lot of their appeal because the cost of collecting them diminishes the actual revenue being raised, but they are starting to get more attention now because the technology for electronic tolling at highway speeds has matured.
Problem #2 ...
The problem with a "gas tax as a surrogate user fee" approach is that the taxes are paid without any regard for the actual use of specific roads at specific times. In other words, the tax is paid up front and then the motorist drives when or where he pleases afterward. This may not have been a big deal when the U.S. was constructing highways all over the place, but the obvious flaw can be seen in the growing traffic congestion on our roads. Our system of fuel taxes is comparable to a supermarket that doesn't charge for individual items, but charges each customer a flat monthly fee on the first day of the month and then allows all the customers to take whatever they want from the shelves for the rest of the month.
Because this arrangement eliminates the direct allocation of costs for each item in the supermarket, the business model is doomed to fail for two reasons: (A) the customer has already paid up front, he has a huge incentive to empty the store every time he walks in the door even if he doesn't need 99% of what he buys; and (B) since the supermarket has already collected the money up front, it has no incentive to provide any kind of quality in the products or the shopping experience. And the supermarket has to keep raising the monthly fee to cover for the excessive drain on its inventory. The end result is a dirty, overcrowded, overpriced supermarket filled with crappy products on the shelves. That's sounds an awful lot like our nation's highway system, doesn't it?