Bridge Collapse Should Be a Wake-up Call
August 3, 2007
Does anybody but me see the irony in this? The Minnesota Twins were scheduled to hold a ground-breaking ceremony on a new taxpayer-funded stadium the day after the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minnesota; a bridge in need of structural repairs that were delayed. Meanwhile, taxpayers ponied up $392 million for the new baseball facility.
In the coming weeks you'll hear one word ad nauseum: infrastructure. Senators and congressmen will rush legislation to the floor to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure. Anything and everything will have that word attached to it for it will mean certain passage. ‘Infrastructure' will take on meanings we could not have imagined just weeks ago. But, apparently, the word has been stretched for quite some time.
We pay gas taxes each time we fill up at the pump. We pay a federal gas tax, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon. We also pay a state gas tax that is determined by the individual states. Currently that's as low as 7.5 and as high as 32.1 cents per gallon. These gas taxes ostensibly go toward building and maintaining infrastructure; ie: roads and bridges. However, closer examination reveals the problem.
States have always held the primary responsibility for upkeep of roads. That's why Tony Snow, White House spokesman, pointed a finger at Minnesota as the news media were pointing their fingers at the president. States get to decide what to spend their gas tax money on and many, if not most, choose unwisely when it comes to infrastructure upkeep.
We not only have a priority problem in this country when it comes to infrastructure, we have a theft problem, as well. Senators and representatives – both state and federal – continually rob the gas tax coffers to pay for things that have nothing to do with infrastructure. A look at the trajectory of the federal gas tax gives you an idea of where we went off the rails.
To augment the state burden, the federal gas tax began in 1932 as a temporary levy. It was set at 1 cent per gallon. Congress made it permanent in 1941 and raised it to 1.5 cents per gallon to help pay for the war effort. Of course, after the war was over and paid for the tax didn't go away. In fact, it went up. It was raised again in 1951 to 2 cents per gallon to pay for the Korean War. The Eisenhower administration began our modern day interstate system, and to pay for it the federal gas tax was raised to 4 cents per gallon in 1959. It remained at 4 cents until 1981. That's when Congress just couldn't keep its greedy paws off of it. By 1993, the tax stood at 18.4 cents per gallon. That's a 360 percent increase from 1981 levels!
Roads and bridges aren't the only things we pay for with the gas tax. The federal government now spends billions on bike paths, hiking trails and museums, including the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan , all out of the federal gas tax. A lot of the federal gas tax goes to pay for mass transit. That's along the same logic line as taxing cigarettes to pay for schools. If your goal is to discourage use of the former you won't have money for the latter.
The lesson learned from the Minnesota bridge disaster is quite simple. Get back to the basics and use the gas tax for that which it was intended – infrastructure – instead of piling on more and more taxes until our whole society eventually collapses.