President Obama hit the road this weekend to promote his plan to boost the country’s infrastructure by a whopping $50 billion. Noting that updates to bridges and roads have been largely pushed aside over the last few years, the President said that now is the time to make improvements:
We’ve always had the best infrastructure… This is work that needs to be done. There are workers ready to do it. All we need is political will.
So political will. Um, and cash.
No sooner had the President announced the plan than the “how are we going to pay for it?” questions started flying. So far, there’s no real agreement on that part of the plan. Some in the White House have suggested that part of the $50 billion would come from closing tax loopholes for oil and gas production. (*cough* -> Never happen.)
What is stirring more interest than corporate increases is the idea of raising the federal gas tax. The current federal gas tax stands at 18.4 cents per gallon and has not been increased in nearly 20 years. That makes it an attractive target.
It’s also not a new idea. The notion of tinkering with the federal gas tax has been tossed about in recent years, most notably a couple of months ago by Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH). Voinovich shocked his fellow Republican colleagues in August when he touted the increase on his website, claiming that raising the gas tax “just a few cents could help create jobs, improve our infrastructure and better the climate.”
Despite the conversations, there’s been no real movement on a proposal to raise the tax. Could one be in our future? It’s hard to tell. Most agree that improvements to the infrastructure, especially aging bridges, need to happen. And in a tough economy, it may be a selling point that a joint study by the Department of Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers indicated that the biggest boost to jobs under an improvement plan would come in the construction field. That’s good news for many considering that the statistics indicate one in five construction workers are currently unemployed.
But will it be enough to push up the gas tax? What do you think?
