Texans Should Pay Higher Taxes

From Breitbart, “Drumbeat to raise gas tax extends to conservative event“:

Texans should pay higher gasoline taxes, a Texas Tech University professor advocated at a policy conference organized by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin on April 16. He acknowledged that how transportation dollars are spent must also be carefully considered.

Generally, I’m a “starve the beast” proponent, but I endorse the view expressed above. In fact, I said it.

“Fuel taxes serve as a road ‘user fee’,” said Michael Giberson, who serves on the faculty at Texas Tech’s College of Business. “Those who use the roads, pay for them.”

Giberson told the TPPF conference attendees that the tax should be increased to a level that brings in the same revenues as in 1991–when the tax was last increased.

Texans currently pay 20 cents per gallon, but to meet the 1991 spending power Giberson said the rate would need to be 33.7 percent. He also recommended tying the gas tax to inflation, so that it would increase automatically.

Giberson acknowledged that more fuel efficient engines and electric-powered cars mean the gas tax will continue to be a declining revenue source. He said other options, such as charging Texans on the basis of their miles-driven, should be considered even as he acknowledged concerns about privacy and practical implementation.

I’d quibble just a bit with the characterization of my presentation. I didn’t recommend a 33.7 cents/per gallon tax, but rather was illustrating the toll that inflation had taken since the state gasoline tax was last raised. I did suggest tying the tax to inflation, but commented that the current method allows the tax to diminish over time and forces the legislature into direct action to raise it. I like that latter idea better the more I think about it.

In Texas two things stand between the fuel taxes and the user fee concept. First, about half of the gasoline tax is federal, 18.4 cents/gallon for gasoline, and Texas gets only about 80 percent of the Texas-sourced federally-collected fuel taxes back from Washington DC. The money comes back with some federal strings attached and some of the money is diverted from projects that benefit fuel taxpayers. Second, the feds 20 percent cut off the top is actually better for Texas fuel taxpayers than the state’s cut. By law, 25 percent of fuel taxes collected in Texas go to state government educational funding, so Texas road users only get about 75 percent of the Texas-sourced state-collected fuel taxes back from Austin. The 25 percent cut of fuel taxes for education is enshrined in the state’s constitution (a holdover, I suspect, when fuel taxes were paid primarily by the wealthy).

In response I favored proposals circulating in Congress to radically cut the federal fuel tax and related spending, and shift the responsibility for revenue collection and spending to the states. Congress has a duty to protect interstate commerce, but that need not involve a massive federal overhead to manage. I’d like to claw back the 25 percent fuel tax take from state educational funding, too. We amend the state constitution in Texas just about every other year, so that is no big deal, but because the amendment would appear anti-education I see it as a hard sell.

I also urged more use of toll roads, which have become much more efficient these days, and congestion-based tolls on roads where congestion is a frequent issue. (Nothing annoys me more than some denizen of east coast metropolitan areas saying federal gasoline taxes ought to be higher because it will reduce congestion. For example. No amount of taxing my cross-Texas drives is going to speed your east coast metropolitan commute.)

In the Breitbart article TPPF Vice President Chuck DeVore pushed back against my tax-raising views. He hasn’t changed his views, but recently in response to President Obama’s transportation spending proposal, DeVore’s views and mine seem pretty close: cut the federal role dramatically and let the states decide the mix of taxes and tolls needed to fund transportation infrastructure for themselves.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation put together a great event, with a program organized largely by TPPF staff economist and recent Texas Tech econ PhD Vance Ginn. Happy to be part of it.

Links to video from the conference and presentations are posted, along with links to other media coverage of the event (mostly focused on the Dallas Fed chairman’s lunchtime remarks, not the “gasoline tax controversy”, but I tried). My presentation is second in the panel 1 video.

ADDED: After my presentation I had two promising suggestions from conference attendees. One is that, given that almost all of the actual wear and tear on the roads in Texas come from heavy trucks rather than cars and light trucks, we should tax large commercial vehicles more–probably on a vehicle-miles traveled basis–and the “user fee” for personal vehicles likely falls to something reflecting the modest consequences of driving relatively lightweight vehicles. Trucking companies would complain, and the political prospects of the idea are probably not good. Otherwise makes a lot of sense to me. The other suggestion was to employ certain oil and gas drilling fees currently in surplus for road work, at least for the road improvements needed in the parts of the state experiencing significant increases in commercial traffic due to the oil and gas drilling boom. The suggestion seems a bit kludge-y to me, but comes with enough symmetry between the payers and the beneficiaries to be plausible. Good enough for government work, as is said.