When Is a Tax Not a Tax? When It’s a Fee to Keep the Highway Trust Fund From Going Broke Next Month.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Good news! The Senate has come up with a compromise 6-year highway funding bill. It’s 1,030 pages long, so no one really knows what’s in it, and it only specifies funding sources for three years. But let’s not be picky. It’s a bill. So where’s the money coming from?

Under the Senate agreement, Congress would raise $47.1 billion to cover three years’ worth of spending through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Lawmakers came up with $9 billion of the total by agreeing to sell 101 million barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile over a seven-year period through fiscal 2025. Another $16 billion would come from lowering to 1.5% from 6% the dividend paid to all but the smallest banks that are members of the Federal Reserve system.

Seriously? Tax increases? Mitch McConnell agreed to this? Maybe it’s in the $22 billion that’s mysteriously absent from the Wall Street Journal’s report. Let’s see if The Hill has more:

“The bill is fully offset with spending reductions or changes to federal programs,” [three Senate sponsors] said. “It does not increase the deficit or raise taxes.”

….The proposal calls for generating $16.3 billion from interest rate changes, $9 billion from sales of reserved oil, $4 billion from customs fees, $3.5 billion from the TSA fees and $1.9 billion from extending guarantees on mortgage-backed securities that had been scheduled to start declining in 2021. Other funding sources in the measure include approximately $7.7 billion in tax compliance measures.

Hmmm. I guess “fees” don’t count as taxes? And apparently neither do “tax compliance measures”—though I’ve certainly heard Republicans claim in the past that efforts to get rich people to actually pay their taxes were little more than a stealth tax increase.

Tomayto, tomahto. Best not to be too fastidious about these things. For example, “tax compliance measures” seems to include a provision that blocks Social Security payments to individuals with felony warrants. That’s a tax compliance measure? Sure, I guess. Whatever.

Amusingly, the money from customs fees comes from indexing them for inflation. And that’s OK with Mitch McConnell. But indexing the gasoline tax to inflation? That’s a tax increase. Absolutely out of the question.

Anyway, the House has its own highway bill, which only runs for six months but would supposedly give them time to come up with a real, honest-to-goodness, fully-funded 6-year bill. That’s very optimistic, considering that Congress has been haggling over this for seven years now and has never been able to do more than pass a quick fix that kicks the can down the road for a few more months. And that might happen again. McConnell and the other sponsors of the Senate legislation want their bill voted on quickly and then approved by the House before the August recess, since that’s when the Highway Trust Fund literally goes broke. But plenty of senators aren’t on board yet, and House leaders are skeptical too. If we end up with yet another 90-day fix, don’t be too surprised.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate