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I'd love to hear ONE candidate propose eliminating the Federal gas tax altogether.
Let the states collect the additional 18 cents/gal and handle all brifge/road repairs.
That would eliminate the Federal middleman and allow the states to prioritize the spending on repair/maintenance
Plus you wouldn't have Congress spending these dollars on usless projects
The Highway Trust Fund will run a negative balance sometime in 2009, yet the Congress and the President fail to make any substantive proposals that would alter this outcome. The Committee unhelpfully points out that the President didn't propose any new ideas, and then happily slices and dices a number of programs into 1,400 earmarks.
TCS has long maintained that earmarking is one of the problems that has led to this bleak outlook for the HTF. Lack of prioritization has been a huge problem for our nation's transportation program for many years now.
When the money coming out of Washington is so thinly sliced, it spreads it out to too many projects for the trust fund to support. In addition, when transportation decisions are made based on political might (ie. earmarks) instead of on the nation's true transportation needs, the priorities still need to be funded.
It is no surprise that the Chair and Ranking of the Appropriations Committee (Reps. Obey (D-WI) and Lewis (R-CA)) and the Transportation-HUD subcommittee (Reps. Olver (D-MA) and Knollenberg (R-MI) were some of the biggest winners in this bill.
http://www.taxpayer.net/TCS/PressReleases/2007/...
Some of the pork:
$100,000 for the Murray Athletic Center at Elmira College
$250,000 for construction at the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center
$100,000 for the Wakely Lodge Resort, a golf course,
$81 million (admin request was $74.2 million) for the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), which is a project of the Mitre Corporation,
$50,000 for the National Forest Recreation Association, for construction of a National Mule and Packers Museum in Bishop, CA
$250,000 for Downtown Roanoke (VA) for Infrastructure renovations for awnings of the historic market,
$100,000 for the Town of Boydton (VA) for development of the Walking Tour of Boydton
Give me a break! Why is the Federal gas tax paying for these projects
Take control out of Federal hands
They just can't resist pork
This was in the House FY08 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies Appropriations bil