Jerry Seib
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2019
last heard Mar 2019
Jerry Seib’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Hate Potholes? Would You Pay a Higher Gas Tax to Fix Roads? · 21 Mar 2019
podcast
Right.
And in fact, the chamber's been saying this since last year, but it got a little more attention this month because the president of the chamber, Thomas Donahue, was before the House Ways and Means Committee and delivered testimony and said, look, the gas tax, the federal gas tax hasn't been increased since 1993.
It's at 18.4 cents a gallon.
Let's increase it by 25 cents over the next five years.
That will produce $400 billion in revenue.
And in a time when the rest of the federal budget is running a trillion dollar a year deficit, where else are you going to find that kind of money to make what everybody agrees are really necessary repairs to America's infrastructure?
And there's support on both sides of the aisle.
I think the Democrats like this because the Democratic unions want the jobs that come along with the construction that this would finance.
Republican business interests, as the chamber's position suggests, like this because they're tired of dealing with infrastructure that makes it difficult to move goods and people and products around the country.
Even environmentalists like it to some extent because it's essentially a carbon tax, and they've long advocated carbon taxes to make it less desirable to burn fossil fuels.
So you have a kind of an odd bedfellow combination and some bipartisanship.
In a rational world, that might translate into action this year, and it still could.
Yeah, because first of all, nobody likes to raise taxes.
There's the political risks to that.
Conservatives are worried about the high tax rates already.
Some liberals don't like gas taxes in particular because they can be regressive.
The burden falls more heavily on lower income people who have to buy
The same gallon of gas a rich person does and pay the same tax, and it's a bigger chunk of their income.
So that's always been one of the problems here.
But I think the bigger issue is probably simply getting something controversial and difficult done in the current somewhat poisonous environment in Washington.
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