Thursday, July 30, 2009
Paying dearly for low gas tax
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Bill Parks
Parks practices law in Covington and serves as secretary to the board of the Shenandoah Autism Center.
Now that Virginians have taken their last laps in the Great Restroom Closing Tour of 2009 and the state song has become "Do a Little Dance," it may be fruitful to reflect on what's really going on with highway funding in the Old Dominion.
The time has come for a tutorial on an economic concept apparently unknown to our legislators -- the hidden tax.
Virginia's legislature has been notorious for too many years for failing, some would say refusing, to solve the state's horrendous highway problems. The Department of Transportation perennially finds itself without enough funds from the General Assembly just to keep its roads in a state of repair. Forget adding lanes or new highways.
Users of Virginia's highways are being burdened with excessive, unnecessary and oppressive taxes just for driving their cars because the General Assembly keeps refusing to produce sufficient revenue to maintain, improve and expand our roads.
In various parts of the commonwealth, daily commuters spend countless hours in creeping rush-hour traffic, barely moving, measuring gas consumption in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon. That's a hidden tax.
Every day, tens of thousands of Virginians consume vast quantities of gas in gridlock, burning up fuel and polluting the atmosphere without moving for minutes and even hours at a time. More hidden taxes.
In some areas, Virginians and tourists travel cratered, rough roads severely in need of repair and resurfacing. Such travel sharply reduces tire life, necessitating earlier and more frequent replacement. Yet another hidden tax.
In brief, Virginians and visitors to the state are paying for millions of gallons of gas that takes them nowhere and for millions of tires that wear out before their time while spewing more unnecessary pollution into the air we breathe. While Virginians' cars are idling or creeping, they are rattling themselves into more maintenance and earlier trips to the junkyard. Multiple hidden taxes.
All this means that Virginians , their guest tourists and transient truckers are spending far more money on gas, tires, maintenance and shorter lives for their cars than they would if the General Assembly fulfilled its responsibility to repair, improve and increase the capacity of the Old Dominion's highways.
Since the General Assembly became addicted to taxophobia, it has been imposing oppressive, needless, wasteful and irresponsible taxation on the users of Virginia's highways by refusing to raise sufficient revenues to take care of our roads.
So the taxophobes have become the taxers by forcing travel on overcrowded, crumbling, inadequate, insufficient, obsolete and uncomfortable highways.
Accordingly, any member who claims that he or she is acting as a responsible fiscal conservative protective of his or her constituents' pocketbooks by keeping transportation taxes down perpetuates a misleading, disgraceful and fraudulent hoax on the people.
The Great Richmond Highway Hoax further slows commerce, limits tourism, decreases sales and income tax revenue and just generally gives the Old Dominion a shabby, neglected and fatigued appearance that snowballs the ill effects of our legislature's gross neglect in the name of saving taxes.
The problems are further aggravated by a per gallon tax of 17.5 cents, one of the lowest in the U.S., which makes revenue unpredictable and subject to the whims of roller coaster gas prices.
With a per gallon tax, consumption and revenue go down as prices rise and go up when prices decline.
Obviously, a gas tax stated as a percentage of the price at the pump would even out the unpredictability of the pennies-per-gallon tax and make VDOT's revenue stream more predictable and reliable.
A percentage tax could also give the taxophobes cover by enabling them to claim a change in the method of taxation rather than a tax increase.
A few weeks ago, Tidewater came to a standstill when a broken pump flooded a tunnel. The ensuing gridlock spanned both rush hours and for a while nothing moved in Norfolk because of drivers trying to escape the jam.
No doubt the drivers in that traffic mess would have been glad to have paid more gas taxes to avoid such an experience. No doubt Northern Virginia, Richmond-area and even, on occasion, Roanoke commuters would agree.
By their inability to solve or even begin to solve Virginia's highways deficiencies, the members of the General Assembly have earned themselves the sobriquet coined by the corrupt and disgraced former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (who resigned when it was revealed that the brown bags on his desk when he was governor of Maryland were full of cash rather than lunch) to describe his political enemies -- "nattering nabobs of negativity."
