Have you ever read the breakdown of the price of gasoline at the pump and wondered where your gas tax dollars go? One would guess that the gas tax primarily funds highway construction and maintenance and one would be right, although it by no means constitutes the highways department’s only funding source. So, out of the 18.4 cent per gallon the federal government levies (which does not take into account additional state taxes), 15.44 cent go to the Highway Account, 2.86 cent contribute to the Mass Transit Account and 0.1 cent go to LUST. I kid you not, somewhere in the federal government sits a bureaucrat who thought it would be appropriate to go with the straight acronym for the “Leaky Underground Storage Tanks” trust fund. While this is mildly funny, the fact that we need a trust fund for leaky underground storage tanks is a bit disconcerting. I suppose awareness of a problem (and funding of the fix) is a good first step to solving it.
But the problem with the gas tax lies elsewhere. While it has been a reliable transportation funding source, thanks to all car-loving Americans who made up for the general trend towards more fuel-efficient vehicles by driving more, the gas tax is not indexed to inflation. Since the last federal gas tax increase in 1993 the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure has gone up by more than 30%, while the gas tax rate remained the same. The increase in fuel consumption has started to level off, much to the joy of environmentalists and to the dismay of those who are trying to find money to fix the crumbling bridges and potholes the size of Texas. Unfortunately the prospects for increasing the gas tax rates are non-existent under Republican leadership and in times when gas prices are as high as they are now (although a quick look at $6 a gallon gas prices in Europe should remind us all that life is still good in the U.S. of A). Of course voluntary taxation has not quite caught on either …