'Raise the Gas Tax Already'
James Surowiecki:
Raise the Gas Tax Already: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a conservative Republican. Senator Barbara Boxer is a liberal Democrat. So the fact that they’ve worked together to come up with a plan to fund highway spending for the next three years might seem like a good thing, a rare moment of bipartisanship in a Congress riven by ideological hostility. And, in fact, you could see the thousand-page bill they’ve produced as, in the words of the Times, “real progress,” except for one thing: their complicated, jury-rigged plan is only necessary because of the continued refusal by Congress to embrace the obvious, economically sensible solution to highway funding, namely raising the gas tax. ...
The fundamental problem, of course, is that raising taxes, no matter how economically sensible those taxes might be, is anathema to a huge swath of the Republican Party. ... Opposition to higher income taxes has some theoretical justification: higher marginal rates discourage people from working more and investing. ... But no such argument exists against the gas tax: all it does, in essence, is ask drivers to pay for the roads they use. It’s not even fair to say that keeping this tax at its current level is a check on big government, since most federal highway spending now goes toward rebuilding and repairing roads—maintenance that even conservatives recognize we must do.
Highway revenue has to be raised somehow. Congress should show some political spine, discard the Rube Goldberg funding schemes, and stop treating all taxes as bad ones.
As noted in the article, there are also, of course, environmental benefits from an increase in gas taxes.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Friday, July 24, 2015 at 10:38 AM in Economics, Environment, Politics, Taxes |
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