Issue Position: Legislative Tunnel Vission and The Zombie Gas Tax

Issue Position

It seems that the only solution to transportation funding is raising the Gas Tax. Raising the Gas Tax is not a long term solution to building the Transportation Infrastructure we need to keep our economy growing. So what is the solution? An additional Sales Tax on top of the gas tax? A Mileage Tax? At some point we have to stop the madness about always raising taxes to fund transportation. If we take all the claims that are made for passing the gas tax as true, we bring in more revenue from sales and other taxes then the bond payments cost in nine years. Why do you need to raise taxes to do this? You would do this if you were a savvy businessperson. If we dedicated the existing sales tax on motor vehicles to the gas tax account, we have an inflation linked funding source and the problem goes away. We need new ideas not new taxes!!

So what is the problem with the gas tax? Well, there are a couple problems, the main funding problem is that the cost of construction is going up with inflation, but the revenue stream is dependent on the gas tax which has no connection with inflation. So we are constantly chasing an ever-widening gap in our transportation budget. In addition to that, people are driving less miles because of high gas prices, and on average, people are buying more fuel efficient cars, which further decreases the amount of revenue from the gas tax.

There are also a number of secondary problems with the gas tax itself and these center around the fact that the gas tax makes it more costly to drive your car. This is a problem for local businesses because the more expensive it is to drive, the more likely people will want to stay home and buy online instead of buying local. The gas tax is also a super-regressive tax on lower income families because lower-income people can not afford to buy newer, more fuel-efficient cars. So the gas tax hurts the small business man who has one full-sized pickup he uses for work and a daily driver, and it hurts the mother who drives her children in an older van or SUV.

One final problem with our current system is that the gas tax account is constitutionally protected for roads, but the state charges itself sales tax on materials for highway projects. (The state does this so it can charge the federal government sales tax on their highway projects.) The end result however, is that on average, $80-100 million of money that is constitutionally protected for roads is routed to the general fund in the form of sales tax receipts. At best, this diversion robs us of valuable transportation dollars, at worst, it is an unconstitutional diversion of protected gas-tax dollars.

You may be wondering, if there are all these problems with the current system, why do we keep doing it? Sometimes when the legislature addresses a problem over and over, they can get "Legislative-Tunnel-Vision" about it and only see the same solution that they have always seen. The gas tax has been the legislature's go-to "solution" to a lack of transportation revenue and seems to be a classic case of Legislative-Tunnel-Vision. In addition to that, downtown Seattle interests have done a number of things to push people into using mass-transit instead of taking their cars, and anything that makes it more expensive to drive helps to push that agenda. Now transit is all well and good, but the fact is, that solutions that may be feasible in an urban area like Seattle, just don't work in a rural district like ours. We can't keep applying a "Seattle-sized-fits-all" approach to the rest of us.

So what is the solution? The solution is to dedicate the sales tax from the sale of motor vehicles to the gas tax account, and to also reroute all revenue from sales tax on highway projects to the gas tax account as well. This would require the state to cut spending by less than 0.5 %. Currently it takes $80 million per year in bond payments to generate $1 billion in road improvements now; this change would provide an additional $6 billion. It's time for a change.

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