The Gas Tax

We have all been hit by the prices at the pump. Because of these increases, along with fuel efficiencies becoming the new holy grail of vehicle manufacture’s, revenues have dropped off. The U.S. Department of Transportation raked in about $71 million less in taxes on gas in 2008 than in 2007. On top of that, Americans drove 12.9 billion fewer miles in November 2008 than November 2007, which are the most recent figures available. Big deal if this hits the foreign companies we have come to depend on so strongly as consumers, but from a different perspective it already has the potential to, like most everything else these days, come around to bite us in the rear.

Both Tom Carper of Delaware, a Democrat, and George Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican, wrote the Obama commission  back in 2010 on how to reduce the debt by increasing the tax on fuel. The two call for a 25 cent hike, where 10 cents goes to paying down the Brobdingnagian national debt we have amassed, and the rest will be allocated to the transportation infrastructure ( i.e. road construction, maintenance, mass transit development).

So far, the solutions proposed to fill in the gas tax gap have amounted to economists calling them impractical and also has privacy advocates raising more than eyebrows at the thought of government monitoring the driving habits of motorists.

“We’re looking at how you would bill people, at invasion of privacy issues, and, human nature being what it is, people will always be looking at ways to beat the system,” said Jon Kuhl, principal investigator for the Road User Study.