California Craziness
The state has gotten itself in a bind (IMO) following a road-building frenzy, one only partially funded by a bond-measure frenzy. The crazy answer is to eliminate reduce the gasoline tax!
The three-bill package would eliminate the state sales tax on gasoline, saving motorists, Nunez says, about 11 cents a gallon, and make up the loss in revenue by raising the sales tax on everything else by a quarter-cent (the swap is roughly $1.3 billion a year), while raising the per-gallon fuel tax in stages by 4 cents a gallon and issuing a $10 billion bond to jump-start highway construction and repay the money shifted away from highway funds in recent years.
- more here
The logical answer of course to raise the gasoline tax, but that would offend all those middle (to lower) class folks who bought-but-can’t-really-afford their SUVs.
I better write some letters later this weekend – any guesses if it will help?
April 11th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
A good way to start would be to spend all the gas tax money on roads. Too much is spent on non-efficient mass transit.
April 12th, 2005 at 9:39 am
“non-efficient mass transit” should definitely be dropped ;-)
That probably means keeping buses …
April 14th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
Are you quite sure you want to do this? I always think that this is a bad idea because higher taxes means the state becomes addicted to them, putting the state in the position of the French government, which finds itself in the peculiar position of funding health care partially out of cigarette taxes.
April 14th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
Well, even if we start with the simple idea that cars and/or gas should be taxed to pay for the services they use … it does lead to a cascade of questions. We could picture a few cars, a few roads, and not that much tax revenue needed to support it, or we could picture many cars and beautiful autobahns running in every direction you could imagine. [That] most extreme case needs a lot of revenue.
I “think” I’m being moderate when I picture limited highway expansion, and some encouragements to reduce traffic (especially California’s exploding long-distance commutes!). I think it supports that model to tax gas, as an easy proxy for “highway use.” We pay for the roads we need, and at the same time discourage expansion of the system. At least in theory.
I think the horror of the more general (sales tax) funding of roads is that it makes it easier to drive, which in turn increases the demand for more construction. We don’t need that kind of feedback loop!
April 14th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Actually, I’ll go further than that. Since gas consumption has negative national security and environmental impacts, it should actually generate a surplus (beyond immediate road services), to be fed back into the general fund. Not an extreme penalty, but enough to nudge consumer behavior in the right direction.
There certainly are questions of balance in that penalty, as the cigarette story might show.