“Community
Columnist” Michael H. Schrader
(About the need for gas taxes)
Written 11 April 2015
I have been
hearing much complaining about the proposed transportation tax increase,
Proposal 1. “We just can’t afford it.” “The state just wastes money.” “It isn’t necessary.” “The poor people are just taxed to death.” Those who are adamantly opposed to any kind
of tax increase, do not waste your time reading the rest of this commentary,
because you have your mind made up and I will never be able to convince you
otherwise. For those with an open mind,
read on.
During the
first Reagan term, I got my first car, a 1970 Pontiac Bonneville. It was a large car that
took up the entire space in front of my childhood home just to park it. At that time, gas hovered around $1 a gallon,
and I made a heady $1.75 at my minimum wage job. To be able to buy one gallon of gas, I had to
work 35 minutes. With a good tailwind,
my Bonneville got about 6 miles per gallon on the
highway. To put things in perspective,
if I had that car today, to make my commute from Port Huron to midtown Detroit
would require 20 gallons of gas, whereas my current Ford Taurus can make the
same trip using only 6 gallons. Assuming
a gas tax of 50 cents a gallon, the state’s loss is $7 a trip each and every time I make the trip due to my upgrade of
vehicles. Five trips a week, 52 weeks a
year, that amount is $1820. If each of
the approximately 30,000 residents of Port Huron upgraded in a similar manner,
the lost revenue to Michigan Department of Transportation would be $54,640,000
per year. I owned that Bonneville 32
years ago, so multiplying that number by 32 gives $1,747,200,000, a staggering
number of dollars that have been lost.
Imagine how good our roads would be if MDOT had almost 2 billion dollars
to spend!
Why should
anyone care about what things were like 32 years ago? The roads that you are driving on that are
falling apart are that old or older.
Much of I-94 in Detroit was constructed in the
1940s and 1950s and is still pretty much the same as it was when it was
built. For all the complaints about lazy
state workers and poor construction, Michigan knows how to build highways that
last. To get fifty to sixty years from a
highway is a testament to the excellence of the Michigan Department of
Transportation. Yes, you can go to other
states and drive on the “good” roads, but don’t be deceived
– they may not be as “good” as you think they are. For example, Ohio and Indiana completed the
four-lane U.S. 24 link between Toledo and Fort Wayne in December 2012, not even
three years ago, and it is already falling apart. Which is better – to spend more money up
front and build a highway that will last half a century, or to spend less and
build one that doesn’t even last ten?
The
opponents like to point out that your taxes will go up, and that good hard-working patriotic Americans are already overtaxed by the
evil government. Are they
really? In 1982, under the anti-tax
president Reagan, I had to work over 35 minutes to be able to buy a gallon of
gas. Fast forward to the present. With the current minimum wage of $8.15 an
hour, a gallon of gas would have to cost $4.65 to reflect the same percentage
of total income. According to the
conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy, once gas exceeds $4.20 a
gallon, the motorist will actually experience a tax savings with Proposal
1. Paying the equivalent percentage of
income as I paid in 1982 results in a reduction in taxes!
Before
deciding which way to vote, remember this – this is our legacy to our children
and grandchildren. Do we want to do
right by them and give them something to be proud of, or do we want to “kick
the can down the road” and let them deal with a crumbling infrastructure?