The Road Taxes Are Coming, The Road Taxes Are Coming

Congressional Republicans are not ruling out raising the gas tax to keep afloat the broke Highway Trust Fund… (WashingtonExaminer)

I assure you I was going to predict this before it hit the news yesterday, but I can’t prove it. I never even tweeted about it. Oh well.

I first blogged about the growing road tax problem over three years ago (wow, that’s like forever in blog-years), and not much has changed since then. It’s been over two years since I blogged about the increase in US oil production, and not much has changed about that, either, except that the oil markets finally responded and dropped like 50% in the last few months.

A couple months in I started wondering if the corresponding drop in gas prices, which I don’t expect to reverse any time soon, would give Congress more appetite for a gas tax increase. The per-gallon funding system is still increasingly broken, but it’s only like 18 cents a gallon. That was a lot when prices were, like, 60 cents before adding that tax. But we’ve seen 300-400 cents now! Prices have dropped like 150 cents from the levels customers have gotten used to, so what’s, say, 9 cents back the other direction? That would immediately give the fund a 50% boost, extending the broken model out for at least several election cycles.

Yeah, yeah, Republicans taking over Congress, Republicans will never increase taxes. Yeah, right. The road tax is one of the more reasonable federal taxes out there (not that there’s a super high bar there), and the numbers just don’t add up anymore. Once they accept it the politicians will come up with any number of justifications. “It’s better than a Big Brother per-mile tax.” Or maybe they’ll extract some sort of concession that theoretically reduces construction union power to theoretically reduce ongoing maintenance costs or something. Or maybe they’ll just hide it in a spending bill somewhere with a graduated increase that hopefully won’t get noticed too intently.

It’ll give people something to complain about when prices go back up, but, hey, they’re going to complain about that no matter what even as they buy more fuel-efficient vehicles that more than offset it. It’ll give Tea Partiers something to complain about while they drive on the federally funded highways to get to their rallies about how the establishment Republicans are so unacceptably compromising of Big Government, which, again, they’re going to complain about anyway.

And the government will still pay people to Build The Roads. And the unsustainably subsidized suburban sprawl will sustain itself a little while longer. And life will go on.