elroy said:
A couple of nights ago I was watching O'reily Factor with Ben Stein. He actually proposed increasing federal tax on gasoline to pay for the shortfall ahead in SS. His reasoning was that increased revenue must be raised for SS and by raising it with an increased gasoline tax it would force us to conserve more and decrease our dependancy on imported oil....
How about using the ALL of the "gas tax" for what it was supposed to be used for... highways! And not going any farther the other way. Ahhh, the politics of politics. ... er, something.
... and like was mentioned in other threads, more alternative fuel is being used (ethanol, hydro., etc.), vehicle efficiencies are increasing (compared to 20 yrs. ago?) and on and on. So, less dollars are coming in already. Apparently it's political suicide to increase the gas tax...
Pretty soon there won't be any roads funding left to drive "your gas guzzling SUV" on.
The overdue Transportation Bill basically maintained transportation funding, but then the cost of cement, steel, oil (read asphalt/tar), etc. all went up. So we're backpeddling.
hehe. /end doom-and-loom rant. Silly Stein.
Edit: For another wakeup: Crawl the web for the number of vehicle miles travelled (VMT) of cars or TRUCKS vs. the number of additional lane-miles added. In ten years, truck traffic has increased 40% and lane miles have increased 4% or some crazy relationship like that. The US has become a "rolling warehouse". I've seen relationships that one semi- truck has the same effect as 10,000 cars.
-CC
