Unintended Consequences-Improve Gas Mileage And Taxes Fall To Dangerous Levels.

Government Regulates Itself Out Of Gas Tax Revenues

March 27, 2014 by Personal Liberty News Desk 

 0 0

 

 0 New

For years, the government pushed automakers doing business in the U.S. to conform to ever-tightening CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards while maintaining conflicting interests in fuel-rich OPEC nations. That dubious conflagration of regulatory zeal and disingenuous foreign policy kept the Federal transportation appropriations bills afloat, in part, on money culled from the taxes American citizens and businesses paid for fueling up their vehicles.

Now, the government is beginning to reap the fruits of discouraging fuel consumption. Gas tax revenues have shrunk to the point that Congress is searching for an alternative revenue stream, and it doesn’t have long to act.

From The Hill:

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the Department of Transportation’s Highway Trust Fund will run out of money as early as August. The trust fund’s coffers traditionally have been filled by the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax, but infrastructure expenses have outpaced receipts in recent years by as much as $20 billion annually.

Congress is currently in the early stages of weighing competing proposals that involve everything from tolls to higher gas tax rates to per-mile driving fees. None of it is politically viable, because every option has a massive potential for backlash from both the public and business interests that drive the transportation economy.

President Barack Obama is supportive of transferring revenue savings from corporate tax reform to the Federal Highway Trust Fund, but that’s an accounting trick with no shelf life: “Corporate tax reform isn’t the gas tax,” one advocate for tolling told The Hill. “It isn’t a user fee. It’s transferring money from other areas of the government.”

Great – but a Federally-sanctioned toll amounts to a transfer of more wealth from citizens to the Federal government and trusting it will effectively serve the people’s interests.

Any takers?