The state Senate has spiked a proposal to slap a 5 percent sales tax on gasoline, and the House of Delegates has passed its package of transportation taxes, land use reforms and VDOT restructuring. Now it’s time for the House package to cross over to the Senate for consideration.
So, this is what it’s like making sausage. The process is truly nauseating… Read the coverage and reach for your vomit bag:
Richmond Times Dispatch
Washington Post
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
Virginian-Pilot
Associated Press
Northern Virginia Daily
As I plow through the details of the legislative process, I am reminded of the observations of fellow Bacon’s Rebellion columnist Ed Risse, who long ago discounted the possibility of anything meaningful emerging from the session this year. I had maintained hope that some incremental progress would be made, and that legislators might demonstrate a growing understanding of the problems we’re dealing with. But the awful truth has dawned upon me: Legislators will succeed only in raising our taxes this year, not in addressing traffic congestion. Once again, it appears, the forces of Business As Usual will prevail. The citizenry will wind up poorer and still stalled in traffic.
I have dedicated many pixels to flaying the Axis of Taxes proposal to boost the gasoline tax as a way to preserve the massive, non-transportation spending programs funded by the General Fund. But at least a gasoline tax has one undeniable virtue: Those who drive are the ones who pay. By contrast, the Republican supporters of the compromise plan avoid the gas tax at all costs. Why? The only justification I’ve heard is that it would be burdensome to drivers, often those who can least afford it.
Instead of a gas tax, the GOP proposes increases auto registration fees, boosting the tax on diesel fuel, taking $250 million from the General Fund instead of rebating the surplus to taxpayers, and giving regional authorities in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads power to impose their own grab-bag of taxes. Are those taxes going to impact Virginians any less than a gas tax? No! Taxes are going to come out of the pockets of taxpayers one way or another.
The difference is that while the gas tax is transparent — motorists are reminded of it every time they top off their tanks — the GOP revenue flows from so many different sources that taxpayers are only dimly aware that their pockets are being picked. Where the gas tax is open and honest, the GOP tax mix is furtive and sly.
Transparency is critical. When you raise the gas tax, taxpayers can see what’s happening. If they don’t like paying the tax, they can change their driving habits in ways that benefit the public good. They can start car pooling, ride a bus or take the Metro. If they’re looking for a new house, they can move closer to where they work. If they have an office job, they can ask their boss to let them telecommute a couple of days a week. If the gasoline tax induces even a few people to change their behavior, it reduces congestion.
By contrast, raising the registration fee on cars imposes costs on all car owners without respect to whether they drive 3,000 miles a year or 30,000. Raiding the General Fund to pay for roads is even worse: It obliterates any vestiges of a connection between those who drive and those who pay. The end result: The GOP compromise package will subsidize those who drive the most — those who contribute the most to traffic congestion — at the expense of those who drive the least. Such an approach is incomprehensible.
In a desperate bid to stave off an election debacle, to say that they’ve “done something,” the GOP legislators have abandoned any pretense of economic rationality. Their compromise package does have elements worth saving: particularly the proposals that would restructure the way roads are built and maintained in Virginia. But those reforms, as useful as they are, won’t begin to un-do the damage of continued subsidies for the driving class.