Politico
By TANYA SNYDER
June 30, 2021
For almost a century, one principle has governed Washington’s approach to transportation funding: The people who drive on roads should pay for them.
But that tenet has been withering for nearly 30 years. And the huge infrastructure packages emerging from Congress and the Biden White House are poised to strangle it.
The reason is simple math: The gasoline tax that bankrolls the federal Highway Trust Fund is politically untouchable, leading lawmakers and presidents of both parties to balk at raising it since 1993. But the money to pay for the nation’s growing needs for roads, bridges and transit has to come from somewhere — and the main answer has been to borrow it, adding it onto the yawning federal deficit.
“We’re seeing all kinds of other sorts of pay-fors to continue to grow the size of the program without having the actual users having to pay for it,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation. “That sets a bad example.”
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