Talk about your gas tax diversion.
This is becoming something of an minor obsession with me, so let me go ahead and apologize right from the start. But it seems like you can’t turn around in transportation circles these days without running into earnest hand-wringing over the future of the gasoline tax. (Rodger and I have written about this before, as it has become something of a political issue in the governor’s campaign and elsewhere, see here and here.)
The problem, as I’ll explain below, is that the whole debate misses something so obvious that it’s hard to take seriously all the reams of research that has been conducted to support the call for scrapping the gasoline tax, and instead taxing drivers for how far they drive.
First the background: Both the U.S. Government and state governments assess a per-gallon tax on motor fuels. In Texas, that’s 18 cents a gallon of gasoline and the feds attach another 20 cents per gallon. It’s been nearly 20 years since either rate has gone up, and pretty much everyone agrees that the revenues to the highway trust fund — which is busted — and to the state highway funds have failed to keep up with the increasing cost of maintaining all those highways and building new ones. (You know, you pay the same 38 cents a gallon in gas today when gas is pushing $2.60 as you did in 1993, when it was about a buck.
To address the funding inadequacy, plenty of folks here and elsewhere suggest we do something simple: Raise the rate, or index it to inflation so it doesn’t keep losing purchasing power.
But increasingly, skeptics make two arguments: One, if it was so easy to raise the rates, then why has Congress refused to do so since 1993, and why have Texas legislators refused to since 1991? It’s ain’t going to happen, they argue, and we might as well accept it.
Secondly, they argue that as vehicles get more efficient, they will travel further on each gallon of gas. So each year, each driver will pay less in gas taxes, even as they drive as much or more on the roads that must be kept up. TxDOT chief Amadeo Saenz likes to say his old Suburban got 12 miles to the gallon and his newer one gets 24.
The big idea:So what to do it about? Increasingly, what we’re told is that the future should include a tax on miles driven. There are lots of ways to do this, but none are simple. The big-idea boys at RAND, smart folks all, have studied the alternatives and suggest three are simple enough to begin testing in the next few years. The report, out today, is available here (
), and a summary is here.
The idea has been tested in Oregon, and recently in Austin I heard an interesting speech (here is a video) by Dr. Paul Hanley, of the University of Iowa. He’s leading a 12-city study of how to go about taxing miles driven.
The problem: So why am I all wound up about this? Because it misses the obvious point. The problem with the gas tax isn’t structural, it’s political. It takes political will to raise those taxes — and that is how it ought to be. Raising taxes ought to be difficult, and it ought to be done only when politicians can make a heck of a good case for it.