Taxes are too low

[gwb72tii]

While I appreciate the sarcasm, we are not paying for things now. Just borrowing more.

Gotta keep your constituency happy.

OMG i'm in love

[mrsleeve]

Well, if the all dolts on the Right would let gas taxes have been raised, or initially indexed to inflation, we might not be looking at this.

But inflation has gone up quite a bit in the last 20 years + increased constructions costs and material costs that have outstripped it.

I suspect you will still be happy to work for the same amount of money the next 20 years regardless of your purchasing power?

we are seeing a little drop off in daily motor fuel consumption since 2008, but as a general rule year over year, we are using more fuel every year. If we assume the chart to be accurate then and not even take the higher taxed diesel fuel into the mix or the other excise taxes placed on motor fuels, the feds are taking about 25.8Billion a year in on the gasoline retail use tax alone. That will pay for a lot "highway and bridge shovel ready jobs" . Even with paying all those over paid union construction hands solid living wages and benefits .

[frankenbeemer]

I don't think 25 billion will do it. SCDOT spent 1 billion last year.

[mrsleeve]

^
While the bulk of the money comes from the gas Use taxes the feds take in about 45b in to the Hwy trust fund, with more coming from heavy use contractors (trucking companies), and sales of nearly everything needed to run a shipping business.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/attrib.cfm

then you have your local and state taxes and sales taxes on top of that (if your state has one) that covers your local and state highways, and makes up a large part of your states DOT budgets. There are other federal taxes on on fuel that are charged and built into the price of your fuel before you get a chance to pay the use taxes on it, but those all go into general fund rather than used for roads. Then you have your local property taxes and special appropriations to help fund road projects and improvements of your more local road system.

[z31maniac]

we are seeing a little drop off in daily motor fuel consumption since 2008, but as a general rule year over year, we are using more fuel every year. If we assume the chart to be accurate then and not even take the higher taxed diesel fuel into the mix or the other excise taxes placed on motor fuels, the feds are taking about 25.8Billion a year in on the gasoline retail use tax alone. That will pay for a lot "highway and bridge shovel ready jobs" . Even with paying all those over paid union construction hands solid living wages and benefits .

More fuel = more traffic = more damage

Especially if you consider the rise of truck/SUV usage over the last 2 decades.

[mrsleeve]

More use = more taxes = more money to fix and improve. Much of the increase in the cost of road building in the last 30 years is due to improved construction methods and materials, ( and the enviromenalists but that's for a differant thread) road we build now will in general last much longer. Also with improved base construction you get much more service life with periodic mill and fill resurfaceing which many times cheaper and less invasive than full bown rebuilds

So you are saying that the increase in suvs that weigh less than the average iron churned out of detroit durring the 1950-1975 is doing mre damage to our roads???? Gotcha

[Q5Quint]

Applicable story:

So our town is pretty much the intersection of two highways. This is a small mountain town with a university~ population 17k, but likely more like 30k if you count the people who are here but not registered here (students, faculty that drive from out of town, and normal people that work in town but drive from TN next door because it is cheaper to live there).

So as a 'shovel ready' project during the bail out, our main road into town, which had previously been a 4 lane highway that ended in a 2 lane highway just before town, got expanded to 4 lanes all the way to the main intersection with hwy 105 in town for around 12 million bucks or so. Of Fed money.

So the neighborhood just behind that main intersection, behind a toyota dealership, can no longer turn left out of their neighborhood due to the median and 4 lane situation. They have to turn right and do a u-turn up the e street to be able to turn left. Maybe 500 or so people live back there.

They have put up a big stink. Their rights were violated- their turning left convenience was taken away just so that traffic would flow smoother around town instead of getting stuck at that intersection.

The toyota dealership was willing to sell their back lot, which would allow a new road to be cut into the neighborhood, but at a price.... A very high price. As in half a million price. Plus the cost of the road/paving/drainage etc which would be another 100k or so.

600k+ to please maybe 500 people, just so they can turn left.

It made me think about how much the road cost in front of my house, and who paid for it, and how 'convenient' it made life for me. If it wasn't for somebody, somewhere else, adding $$ into the tax pool, I am sure we would still have dirt roads and horse paths everywhere in our county.

Our towns budget is cut dry- and people are pissed at the planning dept because they are short staffed. They are pissed at public works because they are short staffed and have no money to fix old infrastructure. They are pissed at the amount of potholes, broken long-term planning, stormwater issues, and a rising crime rate due to unemployment.

But we have some of the lowest property taxes in the state, and that is exactly what it buys for us.

We have the added benefit of salt and ice/snow during the winter- so it tears our roads up horribly. Potholes are not red or blue, but apparently figuring out how to fix them is.

[BraveUlysses]

So you are saying that the increase in suvs that weigh less than the average iron churned out of detroit durring the 1950-1975 is doing mre damage to our roads???? Gotcha

On average, SUVs weigh more and there are a much higher number of them on the road compared to the number of vehicles on the road from 50-75.

According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2009 there are 254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles. Of these, 193,979,654 were classified as "Light duty vehicle, short wheel base", while another 40,488,025 were listed as "Light duty vehicle, long wheel base." Yet another 8,356,097 were classified as vehicles with 2 axles and 6 tires and 2,617,118 were classified as "Truck, combination." There were approximately 7,929,724 motorcycles in the US in 2009.[5]

According to cumulative data[1] by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) the number of motor vehicles has also increased steadily since 1960, only stagnating once in 1997 and declining from 1990 to 1991. Otherwise the number of motor vehicles has been rising by an estimated 3.69 million each year since 1960 with the largest annual growth between 1998 and 1999 as well as between 2000 and 2001 when the number of motor vehicles in the United States increased by eight million.[1] Since the study by the FHA the number of vehicles has increased by approximately eleven million, one of the largest recorded increases. The largest percentage increase was between the years of 1972 and 1973 when the number of cars increased by 5.88%.

US population was 300M in 2010, 215M in 1975 and 152M in 1950.

[mrsleeve]

My point there brave was nearly every single vehicle on the road untill 1975 was pushing closer to 5k lbs than just the truck and suv market. Yes there are way more cars out there today, but to make assertion that incresed suvs on the road is the primary cause of wear and tare is a bit near sighted is all, think what those old station wagons weighed, and they sold by the millions. Since the bulk of cars on the road now are mid sized and down with a curb weight of around 4k lbs or less


Quint: did that sub getting the new road get hit with a special assesment on their property taxes to pay for it? ??? I bet they did. Like in rural areas when a group wants to pave a dirt road, the people that want it and benefit from it have to pay for it with a property tax assessment

[Q5Quint]

In my county we waste a lot of money paving roads that go to BF.Nowhere. Also- bridges built 40 years ago keep collapsing for some reason and we keep having to rebuild them.

I read something that said we have so much asphalt that we are required to use each year due to state contracts, so even though it doesnt make sense we have to pave them anyway. I guess it creates jobs or something.

If we just need more money for roads, there seems like a lot of options:
Deal with bad roads and no bridges (south carolina plan) --or--
Increases taxes somewhere.
Have a bake sale.

[slammin.e28]

I read something that said we have so much asphalt that we are required to use each year due to state contracts, so even though it doesnt make sense we have to pave them anyway. I guess it creates jobs or something.

This. They have to use the funding or they will get less funding next year because obviously they couldn't use it all up this year.

We get the bullshit tar and gravel on our roads when they have too much money. If they'd stop doing that to all the bumfuck farm roads, we could actually fix the falling apart sections instead of just covering it up with gravel that just gets kicked off and washed off the roads in a month.

[mrsleeve]

Well you have to rememeber paving a road reduces annual maintenace costs for a long time. Its cheaper to pave it and let it sit for 15 years and then pay 1 labor hand in a little dump truck a days pay once or twice a year to shovel some cold patch into the pot holes, than it is to send a high paid equipment opperator and 1/2 millon dollars in equipment to use a motor grader to regrade the gravel roads 3-6 times a year to keep them passable

Slammin: the chip seal is a cheap fast way to make a gravel road more durable and cut mainteace on them, though its not for high volume roadways and to give older more worn paved road a more tractionable wear surface to preserve the acctual pavement, to keep from having to repave the road ever 10 years

[slammin.e28]

Slammin: the chip seal is a cheap fast way to make a gravel road more durable and cut mainteace on them, though its not for high volume roadways and to give older more worn paved road a more tractionable wear surface to preserve the acctual pavement, to keep from having to repave the road ever 10 years

They do it on high traffic roads here. May not have been high traffic 20 years ago, but they def are now. These aren't even gravel roads, it's paved roads. Roads that go into developed residential areas. Roads that have giant waves near the stop signs from 18 wheelers stopping there constantly.

I could see this on back country farm roads, but these are no longer back country farm roads. Farmers here are dying out, the land parceled out, and developed. We've got major factories here too, Hershey, Hollister, McKee, Target distribution, and on and on and the trucks are using these roads, people are moving here with the work, for the work, etc. They need to rethink what is a back road and look at what is being used more heavily.

[mrsleeve]

No they will chip seal a low traffic gravel road to improve its wear surface and keep the dust down. They will also chip seal a high traffic paved road to refresh its wear surface and to seal it from the elements. This will lengthen the sevice life of the road way between full remove and replace. Season long construction projects that cost much much much more monney.

I agree if you have that kind of development then of course your infrastructure that's was designed to handle the ocassional farm equipment and big truck nneed to be redone. But the business that have been lured there with tax breaks will not have to bare the brunt of the costs of updating said infrastructure. Which they should its one thing I don't agree with how business is incentivised to locate someplace

[Shekhar]

Senior academic leaders at Howard University have charged that “fiscal mismanagement is doing irreparable harm” to the school in Northwest Washington and urged the dismissal of Howard’s chief financial officer, asserting that his actions have put its survival at risk.

Howard’s Council of Deans alleged that staff cuts at the university have been based on “inaccurate, misleading” data, lamented a decline in research expenditures and contended that a “burdensome” tuition increase has driven away students.

In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, the deans said Howard’s external auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had cited “grave concern about the quality of fiscal decision-making” recently as it terminated its work for the university. Above all, the deans blamed the “fiscal direction” of Robert M. Tarola, an independent contractor who serves as the university’s senior vice president for administration, chief financial officer and treasurer.