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rahvin112
join:2002-05-24
Sandy, UT
| reply to wierdo
Re: Utopia In The Hole
Then you aren't familiar with any state. Gas taxes comprise a 100% of funding in nearly every single state in the union. You pay close to $0.50 a gallon in federal and state gas tax (depending of course on your state's gas tax), all of the federal money is collected in the highway trust fund and expended by congress. This money generally goes back to the states at a 1:1 ratio to what residents in the state pay. The exceptions are Montana and Alaska, Montana received around $2 for every dollar of gas tax collected, and Alaska received nearly $4 for every dollar. Most won't be surprised that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is the head of the Senate transportation committee and Montana up until recently held the seat in the house of representatives.
BTW the 2006 funding bill was the first time in the history of the interstate system that congress fully allocated the highway trust fund to roads and transit, rather than stealing a significant percentage to fund pet projects like the Dan Quayle train museum in the Midwest. 2006 was also the first year that the larger states such as California actually got back from the feds what their residents paid in gas tax.
If Congress had conserved the highway trust fund, instead of robbing it every year for the past 50 years there would be over a trillion dollars of unspent gas taxes that could actually be allocated to rebuilding the national highway system. As many of you are probably aware the highways were built in the 50's and 60's with a 50 year life span. That life span is up, and repair of just the interstate system will cost 100's of billions.
In fact there are 260,000+ bridges in this country that don't meet safety standards and can't be repaired because the money isn't allocated to fix the infrastructure. As a result the states and FHWA have moved into preventative failure mode where bridges are only fixed when they absolutely must be (such as a large chuck of the deck falling out), rather than when they should be (such as when an engineer inspects the bridge and notes that the rebar that provides strength to the structure has rusted away). | |
wierdo
join:2001-02-16
Tulsa, OK
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| said by rahvin112  :Then you aren't familiar with any state. Gas taxes comprise a 100% of funding in nearly every single state in the union. You pay close to $0.50 a gallon in federal and state gas tax (depending of course on your state's gas tax), all of the federal money is collected in the highway trust fund and expended by congress. This money generally goes back to the states at a 1:1 ratio to what residents in the state pay. The exceptions are Montana and Alaska, Montana received around $2 for every dollar of gas tax collected, and Alaska received nearly $4 for every dollar. Most won't be surprised that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is the head of the Senate transportation committee and Montana up until recently held the seat in the house of representatives. No, they don't. In my own state, we recently spent a couple of billion dollars over a few years from bonds backed by sales tax revenue to fund many needed road repairs.
In Oklahoma, the lion's share of the road budget (which is not nearly enough given that they literally have the worst bridges in the country, bar none) comes from tolls generated by the turnpike system, so you are at least partially correct. The rest does indeed come from fuel taxes, although they do also have many projects funded by sales tax and income tax revenue from time to time, especially in the case of city streets.
In fact, in every state, the lion's share of the road mileage is in cities, and in most cases the vast majority of the funding for maintenance and new building of that road mileage comes from city sales taxes, property taxes, or other non fuel tax funding sources, depending on the state.
Again, fuel taxes do pay for much of the maintenance on our highways, but by no means all. Even at the federal level, many road projects are funded out of general revenues, not the nearly depleted highway trust fund. Highways and Interstates are by no means the bulk of the road system in this country.
Once again, since I apparently need to repeat myself several times for some here to understand what I'm saying: Fuel taxes make up a large part of the funding formula for roads in this country, but not all of it. If you count city streets, it probably doesn't even come to half. | |
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