“Gasoline taxes and tolls pay for only a third of state and local road spending,” claims a report released yesterday by the Tax Foundation, a supposedly independent, non-partisan group. “The rest was financed out of general revenues.” According to the group’s calculations, users paid just $49 billion of the $155 billion cost of roads in 2010, the last year for which data are available.
The Antiplanner is the first to admit that highways are subsidized. But do subsidies cover more than two-thirds of the costs of roads? No way. The Tax Foundation, which claims to be “guided by the principles of sound tax policy: simplicity, neutrality, transparency, and stability,” is simply wrong.
First, the group counts federal aid to states as “general funds.” In fact, 100 percent of that federal aid comes from gas taxes and other user fees such as taxes on large trucks and tires.
According to the Federal Highway Adminitration’s Highway Statistics table HF-10, the feds collected $35 billion in gas taxes in 2010, of which $29 billion was given to the states for roads. For some reason, though the Tax Foundation counts state gas taxes as user fees, it doesn’t count federal gas taxes as user fees.
