No one in Congress wants to raise the gas tax even though our transportation infrastructure is crumbling and revenue from the tax has been falling. Brad Plumer rounds up some substitute ideas:
One idea is a vehicle-miles traveled tax, which would track driver habits via GPS and charge per mile driven….Another is to charge some sort of congestion fee on overclogged highways….Mica, for his part, has suggested extending the Build America Bonds program….A bipartisan team affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment has proposed an upstream tax on oil combined with a variable gas tax that shrinks when oil prices rise and expands when oil prices plummet.
Uh huh. Or we could, you know, just raise the gas tax. We are ruled by idiots.