So gas tax revenues are insufficient to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. Congress could increase the gas tax, but won’t; it’s highly unpopular and only a handful of members favor an increase. Barack Obama understands that and is not seeking one.
Here in a nutshell is the scam being perpetrated on the American people. Gas tax revenues have been spent by an out of control Congress on things unrelated to highways. An example might be rail projects, or mass transit boondoggles, etc.
So the idea now is to get states to bail out the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), which they seem eager to do. Well the fix needs to take place in Washington, before we add to the problem. Do not let your state legislators buy into this scam of continuing redistribution of wealth.
The TTF is only empty because Congress emptied it by spending too much.
They said the same thing about Social Security too.
Any and all of these “lockbox funds” are government Ponzi schemes. All taxes go into the general fund first. An unaccountable scam of historic proportions.
“So the idea now is to get states to bail out the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), which they seem eager to do. Well the fix needs to take place in Washington, before we add to the problem. Do not let your state legislators buy into this scam of continuing redistribution of wealth.”
Here in CO, the talk among a lot of liberals and conservatives is not bail-out but keeping the gas tax money for ourselves and spending it ourselves. Not so sure the state can do any better a job than the feds. It has a huge, corrupt transit bureaucracy, just like the feds, but smaller. More money would fix that.
The other, and completely local problem in CO is that we have a taxpayer bill of rights (TABOR). Any tax increase has to go to the voters. Dems and many R’s despise it. But TABOR doesn’t apply to “fees” and the Democrat supreme court has held that practically any revenue enhancer can be called a fee by the legislature. The gas tax might then be classified as a fee and not subject to TABOR. So if CO took back the gas tax revenue, we would quickly become a state with the highest gas fees in the nation and those fees would fund every union pension fund in the state.