There are many things in this country that can make you scratch your head. Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? Roundabouts? Why do cats always land on their feet? And, politicians debating anything in congress! Is there anything that seems less pointless than politicians talking for hours about a subject that 99% of them have already made up their minds?
Case in point is the debate on the Highway Funding Bill.
Highway funding is a problem, but it is not “the” problem.
First of all, I keep seeing this quote from multiple sources:
“With greater fuel efficiency, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric cars, hyper-efficient diesel, people who are putting the same amount of wear and tear on roads and occupying space and creating congestion have wildly different payments that they make through the fuel tax.”
According to U.S. Energy Information Administration, gasoline consumption in the U.S. at the retail level has gone down by 66.76% from 2008 to 2014. That means, no matter how much you raise the taxes on gasoline and diesel, you cannot overcome the fact that the problem with U.S. highway funding is not that taxes are too low, but the economy is just plain bad. You do not drop fuel consumption by 66% just because of better fuel efficiency.
If you look at the two charts here, you will see that from 1993 to 2008, the U.S. maintained between 50 to 60 million gallons of gasoline per day. Then in 2008, at the beginning of the economic collapse, there is a swift drop in retail sales of gasoline. Recent economic numbers from the government showed a drop in GDP by 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014. If congress wants to fix the highway funding problem over the long term, it has to make better policies that will allow good economic growth.
Second, raising the gasoline tax by 12 cents per gallon may not seem like much, but do some simple math and realize that this 12 cents per gallon over two years is a 65.2% increase. When was the last time you were happy with a 65% tax increase? I guarantee that the average American could come up with a way to cut spending out a bloated federal budget by the end of the day to cover whatever funding shortfalls there are in the Highway Trust Fund. In this time of economic recession, this is not the time to be raising taxes of any type. Maybe congress should get out of its own way and let the American people do what we do best; build a great economy.
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