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What does the Government plan to do about gas prices: Raise the Gas tax?
By Julie | July 22, 2008
The past couple days The Bald Monkey has had some interesting posts, concerning gas prices. Yesterday he posted on the brilliance of the battle for congress to, again, refuse off shore drilling. (Click on the link to see the hilarious cartoon he has on his site) In doing so, congress maintained their on-going procedure in dealing with gas prices: doing nothing. Today, he (The Bald Monkey) posted about congress’ new plan to help America: raising the gas tax, which would raise gas prices. This article had me pretty riled up, and after leaving a long comment to his post I decided to write about it here.
His post referenced this Fox News article: Lawmakers Could Consider Gas Tax Hike, After Gas Tax Holiday Fails
Here’s a recap from the article:
Despite calls from the presidential campaign trail for a Memorial Day-to-Labor Day tax freeze, lawmakers quickly concluded - with a prod from the construction industry - that having $9 billion less to spend on highways could create a pre-election specter of thousands of lost jobs.
Now, lawmakers quietly are talking about raising fuel taxes by a dime from the current 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.3 cents on diesel fuel.
They are “quietly” talking about this? How courageous, they plan to stomp on the people who gave them a job by electing them, but cowardly keep this quiet. With maneuvers like this, if we end up knowing names involved, they probably won’t be reelected.
With gas prices setting records daily, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and former Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for a 90-day suspension of the federal fuel tax to give drivers a little relief at the pump. The fuel taxes go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is used for road construction and repair and mass transit.
Clinton suggested making up for the loss by imposing a windfall profit tax on oil companies, an idea that Republicans rejected. McCain said the money could come out of the general Treasury fund, in effect adding to the federal deficit, and is still getting mileage from the idea.
Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, opposed the idea from the beginning and the White House gave it a cold shoulder. Depriving the 52-year-old Highway Trust Fund of $9 billion at a time when it is heading into the red doomed the notion of a gas tax holiday in Congress.
The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. James Oberstar, and the chairman of the highway subcommittee, Rep. Peter DeFazio, presented fellow lawmakers with a list of how many jobs and how much money each state would lose. It ranged from $30 million and 1,000 jobs in Vermont to $664 million and 23,000 jobs in California.
Just three years ago, that trust fund enjoyed a surplus of $10 billion. Even without a tax freeze, the fund is projected to finish 2009 with a deficit of $3 billion. That that could grow as Americans drive less and buy less gas because of higher pump prices.
The consequence is that only about $27 billion in federal money will be available next year to states and local governments for new infrastructure investment even though the current highway act calls for spending $41 billion a year. For many, the solution is to raise rather than suspend or cut federal fuel taxes, which haven’t changed since 1993.
Oberstar, D-Minn., said his committee is working on the next long-term highway bill. He estimated it will take between $450 billion and $500 billion over six years to address safety and congestion issues with highways, bridges and transit systems.
Let me give you a tip here, if people can’t afford to pay for gas, they won’t be driving. That alleviates safety and congestion on high ways, thus freeing up $500 billion.
After reading, this is pretty much what I posted to The Bald Monkey:
Our government is becoming more and more inept, which is a pretty amazing feat! American’s are driving less, because of the gas prices, so the government doesn’t have as much money to pay for road repair. Hmm, if the roads are not driven on as often they are not getting torn up, so they need fewer repairs. Then it says if they don’t instill the gas tax the construction industry will lose jobs. Now, I don’t want anyone to lose their job. BUT, Americans are already losing jobs because companies can’t afford these high gas prices. So, why would congress make it harder, and probably cause more people to lose jobs, just to make it easy on the construction industry? Do they just want to spend millions on road construction to fix roads that don’t need repair because they are not being driven on? As congress sat on their butts and did NOTHING but watch the economy spiral downhill as gas prices rose, did it never occur to them that government jobs, or government contracted jobs would eventually be affected? Maybe if they’d try to come up with a solution, like drilling, that could work, we wouldn’t be in this mess. If anyone deserves to lose a job, it’s these idiots! If they were in the private sector, where people are expected to show results for work, they’d be on unemployment now. This was my favorite line from the article…
You can’t destroy present economics to pay for future economic growth, otherwise the future will see no economic growth, let alone a STRONG growth.
The nonpartisan National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission concluded in a report this year that the U.S. needs to spend $225 billion annually over the next 50 years to create a highway and transit system capable of sustaining strong economic growth. Current spending, at federal, state and local levels, is about $90 billion a year.
After posting that, I came up with another way for the government to save money for roads: quit paying for studies to analyze roads American’s can’t afford to drive on. Maybe this will be enough to account for the shortage, alleviating the need to raise the gas tax. Another solution, fire everyone in congress, have itelligent people, who manage companies with a balanced budget, come in and fix the mess these idiots made.
The government gets a lot of money from every one of us living in this country. Just like a family, or a company, they need to support their systems based on their budget! If they can’t, cut unnessary spending, like repairing roads based on standards from 15 years ago when gas was affordable, because standards have changed as gas prices tripled.
Topics: In the News |
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
You know that guy is z paid pundit, trying to convince you of a party line. Read his disclosure statement.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Never mind. I don’t mean to disparage who you want to listen to. I trust you guys to think through issues for yourselves.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Sorry I didn’t respond earlier. I have a cold and haven’t felt like doing much.
Anyway, I just wanted to explain. I put links in because there were 2 posts back to back I thought were relevent, and I really liked the cartoon posted. I thought other people would.
But the recap of news I posted came from a Fox News article (it’s linked). That article was not the only one I read on raising the gas tax. There was a similar story in our paper Sunday. I did more research online and found several other articles from news sources. Most of them said similar things, and several referenced their material came the associated press. I don’t want you to think I didn’t do any research and just posted based upon one source. I usually try to find a few different sources before I post on news related topic. I usually don’t include that many because I don’t want to make posts too long. I didn’t think you were trying to “disparage” us.