So the idea of a gas tax holiday is pretty much dead in the water at this point. But, Democrats aren’t satisfied with just that. They’re now talking about adding up to a dime a gallon to the price of fuel in order to pay for assorted highway construction projects…
Senate Democrats in May tried to add $5 billion to an aviation overhaul bill to replenish the highway trust fund next year; Republicans objected. Democrats tried again in June, but this time for $8 billion; Republicans objected to that, too.
Congress should first reduce spending on pet projects, known as earmarks, argued Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. “I’m not going to let the Senate spend all this money when nobody is looking, especially when we refuse to stop wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on earmarks.”
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.
“We’ll put all things on the table,” Oberstar said, but the gas tax “is the cornerstone. Nothing else will work without the underpinning of the higher user fee gas tax.”
At the very least, the gas tax should be indexed to construction cost inflation, DeFazio said.
Now, I am a fan of investing in infrastructure improvements. But the amount of waste that goes on when Congress meddles in how these funds are spent is obscene! To raise gas taxes at this time would be disasterous economic policy.
July 20th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
The gas tax will have to go up. We now spend $90 billion per year when it should be $225 billion; that’s why you see crumbling infrastructure. Cutting the tax would mean fewer jobs, damage to cars and trucks, lives lost, and a decrease in commerce. Not to mention it would encourage a faster depletion of fossil fuels and an increase in pollution. Anyone who claims to support it is a phony and playing up to the most uninformed. The cold reality is, we’re going to have to drive less and give up the 3000-mile caesar salad.
July 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Let’s raise a little stress on the Democrats and vote them out of office. The founding fathers fought the British because we had “taxation without representation” and we need to fight these spend and do nothing Democrats who are the prime example of what is worse than the British monarchy taxing Americans unfairly. We now have excess and unfair “taxation with representation” and our first action must be to vote them out and elect representatives who will stop stealing my money and giving it away or wasting it on inefficient and unnecessary bloated governmental programs.
Vote this fall and next year and vote out all the lousy incumbents. Retain only fiscal conservatives and representatives who will do the peoples business without waste, fraud, pork-barreling or corruption. We need new leadership in the Senate and House since they make the laws and blame everyone else for what they have screwed up through their own ineptitude. “Dump the Bums!”
July 21st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Voting anyone in or out will not fix roads and bridges. Only money will do that. For the cost of the senseless war, we could have built amazing public trasit systems all across this country. Oil dependancy is the biggest threat to national security.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Tim: You have bought into the the BS. None of these politicians gives a hoot about your safety or mine. They care about POWER. Not even money…only POWER. This is nothing more than political fodder for the election. If anything, take this as a sign of things to come under an Obama administration. High taxes, less freedom, and a large over-reaching government that has its own survival in mind. BTW, give up the global warming BS. It’s over. Al Gore has exposed himself for the fraud that he really is. He’s done. The Earth has cooled an entire degree in the last year so, that one degree over the last century of warming has disappeared in a year? How could that be? We are warming right? CO2 will kill us all right? WRONG.