Gas tax ignorance and the VMT fee

Not too surprisingly, people aren’t well-informed about the gas tax.  Americans of different income and political affiliation believe the gas tax is raised annually or at least every few years, but it actually was last raised in 1993.

Here’s the Infrastructurist blog explaining the results of a recent poll from Building America’s Future:

The survey was done from June 30 through July 2, 2009, and involved 800 adults, with a +3.46% margin of error. And a whopping 60% of the respondents — Republican and Democrat alike — believe the federal gas tax is raised annually. Geographic location didn’t make much of a difference — 61% believed this incorrect statement in the Northeast, 58% in the South, 54% in the Midwest, and 67% in the West.

The truth, of course, is that the federal gas tax has been unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. And, in a colossal error of judgment, the government neglected to index it for inflation. So it’s worth even less now than it was then.

To work around our false impressions (government taxes all the time!!!), Trey Baker and the Texas Transportation Institute supports a Vehicle Miles Traveled fee.  Though I am still against it as an ideal policy, I understand that it might be the best way around the current logjam.  Here is the closing report from their Symposium on Mileage-Based User Fees.

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