Here we go again. Last week, President Barack Obama signed a highway and transit spending bill, sent to his desk by Congress, that is not fully funded.
It’s nice for once that the members of Congress worked together to pass something, but they failed to make the hard choices. The bill is estimated to come up $20 billion short over two years.
One word best describes this sort of plan: Dysfunctional.
As Erich Zimmermann, a senior policy analyst for transportation at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington budget watchdog, was quoted in a McClatchy Newspapers report: “We’d all love to budget by pretending we can pull money out of thin air ... this is clearly going on the nation’s credit card.”
Highway projects are important, and even essential, for Americans to move around and for our businesses to prosper.
It’s also important for these roads to be safe. For instance, people need to be able to drive though Milwaukee’s interchanges and over its bridges without fear. We don’t want a crisis here in Wisconsin as they had in Minneapolis in 2007, when a bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13.
Here in Racine County, along Interstate 94, some of the scissor on-and-off ramps that criss-cross with frontage roads are a fatality waiting to happen.
But just like every other aspect of government, Congress also has to honestly look at ways to cut or at least prioritize projects.
To pass a bill that doesn’t have enough funding to support it is similar to the Racine Unified School District passing the buck on closing Goodland and Wind Point elementary schools earlier this year. The district doesn’t have enough money to support them, but instead of dealing with it, there seems to be a philosophy in government that things will work themselves out.
Again similar to Unified, instead of talking about cuts, many in Congress are talking about ways to increase taxes, including the gas tax.
It’s true the 18.4 cents-per-gallon gas tax that took effect in 1993 has lost a lot of its spending power due to inflation. That has affected the Highway Trust Fund and that problem needs to be addressed.
But at the same time, gas has gone up from about $1 in 1993 to about $3.50 now. While it’s a break from the $4 per gallon we saw earlier this year, that’s a dramatic increase over 19 years.
Based on the average American driving 13,476 miles per year, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics, that means the average American is already paying $1,000 more annually for gas than in 1993.
The government only receives a small chunk of that, but gasoline already hits Americans’ pocketbooks hard.
Any tax added to that would hit Americans even harder. Before that happens, Congress should first get its fiscal house in order and make tough choices.
- Journal Times Editorial Board
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