Most of the Governor’s proposal I am ok with…but I vehemently disagree with eliminating the gas tax and raising the sales tax…and I’m a tad bit leery of boosting the allocation to transportation because of the potential to negatively impact state funding of other obligations. Something needs to be done though…2+ decades of inaction have really put the screws to our situation, and the longer a true fix is stalled because of punting it to the next group of people in charge…or by proposing cockamamie plans that make no lick of sense, the worse we’re going to be.

I agree with raising the fuels tax (and then indexing to inflation), and levying the added fee for alternative fuel vehicles (many don’t use taxed fuel, or use a substantially reduced amount while still wearing on roads, but perhaps $100 is too high)…I’m also ok with the boost in registration fees. It may still not be a perfect long-term plan, but it’s better than the proposals out there now.

But whatever you do, don’t raise the gas tax.

Even some Repubs are admitting that something needs to be done. So what happens? McD proposes this harebrained scheme that has totally distracted everybody, which, as I said months ago, was probably his plan to begin with.

To Leon, the fact that you would offer a statistic proves you’re a no-good, lily-livered subversive.

Statistics are for commies!Everybody in the Tea Party knows that!

Comment by Sandi Saunders — February 7, 2013 @ 10:58 pm

As long as you place no more credibility on the two premises I deflated you will be OK, although still suffering from Lypocrisy.

The net result of those changes? A less-responsive postal service that likely still bleeds money and continues to get calls from many for it to be privatized…when in reality vast portions of it already are. They have to contract with Fedex for air shipments…they sold their fleet.

But I was also thinking of what I saw first-hand working for VDOT for over 4 years, before moving to the private sector. I watched the budgets get cut year after year, and managers grappling with less funding available, but growing needs to address. I watched maintenance schedules get reduced in frequency…mowing, brush cutting, ditch and culvert cleaning, bridge inspections, re-paving, re-striping, sign replacements…you name it. If it could get deferred, it did. The net result of deferred maintenance is it’s more expensive to maintain once you get around to it, because the condition is even worse. That’s why instead of simply doing minor rehabilitation on roads and bridges, we’re now having to completely reconstruct hundreds of bridges across the state, and tear up and rebuild thousands of lane-miles of roadway. Had we simply had the money to maintain them properly…millions of dollars would have been saved. Instead, we have infrastructure conditions that are rapidly deteriorating, and resulting in the need for new construction funds because once things get bad enough, it’s no longer a maintenance issue but a reconstruction one.

Or, alternatively, you could follow terps’s lead and flat make crap up and try to sell it as reality. That seems to work equally well here.