What a great idea, use tax revenue for what they were intended. WOW! Who knew? This is just like the Social Security 'lock box' that was fed to us for so many years. Washington stole the money from us to fund special projects in their districts and to help themselves get reelected.
Why is this so hard to fix? The bill that is proposed here is a good one in that the idea the states can control the money better is a no-brainer. Any time we can take the control of revenue funds out of the hands of Washington will be a winner for everyone.
Gas Tax Funds Special Programs
Source: "Patching Potholes," Investor's Business Daily, May 19, 2011.
Washington collects as much as $25 billion in federal gasoline taxes a year. Ideally -- and ethically -- every penny of those taxes should be spent on federal roads, repairing the old ones and building new ones where needed. But it isn't. Only about 60 percent is used for federal highways and bridges. The rest is spent on whatever Washington decides to use it for, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).
In many cases the taxes fund museums, bike paths, trails and lighthouse repair.
A good chunk of the federal gasoline tax is also used to subsidize public transportation -- when the tax was hiked by a nickel in 1982, a penny of that increase was committed to urban transit.
Meanwhile, car commuters are stuck in traffic, and ruining tires and suspensions on cracked asphalt and broken concrete.
In separate bills, a couple of state lawmakers in Michigan, Paul Opsommer and Tom McMillin, have introduced resolutions asking Washington to let the states keep the revenues from the federal gasoline tax rather than round-tripping the money around the Beltway.
No doubt, politics and grasping bureaucrats are also at the state level, but states are better suited for making the right decisions about where the money is spent. They know what the right priorities are, and state lawmakers are more accountable to the voters because they still live down the street or across town.
Letting states keep and spend the revenues would also make the dollars go further, says IBD.
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The feds won't want this, they will lose the ability to blackmail states on policy issues they shouldn't be weighing in on under the 10th Amendment. This isn't just about taking money away from Michigan for other state Pork projects, it is to force them to do things like REAL ID.
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