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Originally Posted by AubieTurtle
Care to reword that? The word "large" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. I'm thinking a word like "tiny" or "pathetic" would be better.
I'll keep your words in mind when I'm driving my home down the road or when I'm driving a gallon of milk to the Braves game because property and sales taxes are what fund Georgia roads, not our practically non-existant fuel tax. If it wasn't for the federal gas tax and USDOT, drivers in Georgia would pay almost none of the cost. Of course politicans in Georgia will tell you that the feds are ripping us off, taking Georgia money to build roads in the rest of the country.
Ooops... darn, it's annoying when people look things up for themselves instead of blindly listening to politicans telling them what they want to hear. The politicans are playing a cute game... they take that green bar at the end, the one that shows the national average return, compare it to Georgia's return, and say "Hey, we're getting ripped off" when the truth is that the feds are paying out more money to everyone than they are taking in from fuel taxes. Where does this money come from? Income taxes on everyone (and more and more, borrowing money from other countries), regardless of how much they drive. At least the feds do keep the payout for roads close to the income they take in, unlike Georgia, which makes road users pay almost none of the cost.
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Looks can be deceiving, so I would invite a closer look at your first graphic. Georgia's 7.5 cents per gallon Motor Fuel Tax is indeed the third-lowest in the US, behind only Alaska and Wyoming. But Georgia collects another 13.8 cents per gallon at the pump in the form of "other" State and local taxes, so
we actually pay 21.3 cents per gallon in Georgia for the use of our roads -- only the 25th-lowest among the states. And a large part of the untold story is that Georgia's "other" gasoline taxes are Percentage taxes (unlike the cents per gallon Fuel tax), so the revenues from those sources have risen sharply with the rise of gasoline prices.
By comparison with our 21.3 cents per gallon levy, gas purchasers pay 20.3 cents in AL, 21.8 cents in AR, 31.9 cents in FL, 18.5 cents in KY, 20.0 cents in LA, 18.8 cents in MI, 30.2 cents in NC, 16.8 cents SC, 21.4 cents in TN, and 19.2 cents in VA. (Source: American Petroleum Institute;
Notes to State Motor Fuel Excise and Other Tax Rates; 10/10/2006) So Georgia's road-use taxes aren't as "tiny" or "pathetic" as you might have believed. And this begs the question: How can North Carolina collect 150% of Georgia's fuel tax rates and still have such relatively crappy roads? I would say we're getting a lot of bang for the buck.
It is also worth noting that your graph measures highway funding sources Per Capita -- not per vehicle. There is apparently no shortage of funds, since the level of Georgia's highway funding is equal to the average for all states, as measured by Gross State Product. So I would have to conclude that the bulk of Georgia's highway funding comes from the road users who are paying the 21.3 cents per gallon levy -- and not from those Georgians who drive very little or not at all.
The issue of ripping off the Federal government is another matter altogether, and one on which I agree with you. Uncle Sugar's 18.4 cents per gallon levy goes straight into the Highway Trust Fund for specific disbursement, but that take falls far short of the largesse he shells out to buy votes for Congress. While Georgia might get a smaller return of the stolen goods than some other states, we are still bandits at the public trough.
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) to double the capacity by building toll lanes in the center of the road. This will relieve traffic on the existing lanes, and charge only those who dont have the patience to wait. Going this method, would free up that billion that would have been spend expanding the highway to be used for fixing the feeder road problem in the metro, and adding alternative transit lines where feasible.
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