By Natalie DeCoste
A bipartisan group of lawmakers from the House of Representatives has endorsed a report that recommends raising the gas tax to pay for infrastructure spending.
The report comes from 58 lawmakers in the House, 29 Republicans, and 29 Democrats, known as the Problem Solvers Caucus. The report is titled “Rebuilding America’s Future” and includes several suggestions funding the Highway Trust Fund.
“America’s infrastructure supports the world’s largest economy across a network of over 4 million miles of roadway, 160,000 public water systems, 5.5 million miles of local electrical distribution lines, and over 100 million fixed broadband subscribers. Unfortunately, due to years of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, America is no longer keeping pace and continues to fall behind other countries. By some estimates, the funding gap may be as high as $2 trillion by 2025 across all sectors of American infrastructure,” read the executive summary of the report.
The suggestions in the report include indexing gas and diesel taxes to inflation, highway construction costs, fuel-economy standards, or some combination of the three.
Also suggested is “incentivizing the transition to a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) program by supporting additional VMT pilot projects and assessing the functionality of and public reaction to these programs. Congress should also consider creating a pilot project to implement a mileage-based user fee on fully automated vehicles.”
The VMT tax is one area where there is some bipartisanship when it comes to raising taxes since more electric vehicles are on the road each year.
“It is an improvement over a traditional gas tax because it better reflects the wear-and-tear vehicles place on roads, rather than on the amount of gasoline they consume. Despite these advantages, neither a gas tax hike nor a VMT is likely to pass Congress since both violate President Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on households making $400,000 or less,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.
People with electric cars will also see their contribution to the Highway Trust Fund increase if these suggestions are adopted. The report calls for a modest annual registration fee on fully electric and hybrid electric vehicles. These vehicles currently either contribute nothing or contribute significantly less to the Highway Trust Fund than gasoline-powered vehicles.
The endorsement of this report puts the Problem Solvers Caucus at odds with the White House, which has proposed paying for the massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan through a corporate tax hike and rejected raising the gas tax.
The gas tax has not been raised by Congress since 1993 and currently remains at 18.4 cents a gallon.
The $2 trillion infrastructure bill was met with significant reservations by the Republican party, who have proposed a $568 billion proposal as an alternative to President Biden’s plan in the Senate. Even the significantly less expensive bill was met with Republican criticism as some in the party alleged that the bill is too broad.
“The time is now for Congress and the administration to reach across the aisle, unite and boost investments in our surface transportation network that will move our transportation systems into the 21st century,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), the co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus.
