Politics, Society

Obama Administration Moves Toward Tolls On Interstate Highways

220px-Atlanta_75.85I have previously written about the proliferation of toll roads in the United States as governments shift the cost of highways to citizens while spending wildly on foreign wars and losing billions of waste. Congress allows billions to literally disappear in places like Iraq and Afghanistan or give billions in aid to affluent countries like Israel, but it insists that American citizens already struggling financially should be forced to pay to use their federal roads. The change is a fundamental shift in our approach to highways which were viewed as the basic service supplied to taxpayers. However, the Administration has quickly open the door in the new transportation bill to end the long tradition of free federal highways. Of course, do not take too much cash on the highways, because it can be seized by police in the growing number of pretext stops called “policing for profits.”

This move follows states like New Jersey closing bathrooms and ending other basic programs. It seems that there are fewer and fewer benefits that citizens can expect for their taxes. They must pay the government and then pay again to use basic government services. This is an effective tax disguised as a toll that will hit low income people the hardest and add a new barrier to their securing or maintaining jobs. I could not care less about the cost but there are many, many families where this seemingly small added toll will be a hardship. It is cumulative for such families. At every turn, they are being asked to pony up for government services. While the Administration and Congress talks a good game about fighting for the shrinking middle class, it routinely shifts more and more costs over to such families while using tax dollars to literally deliver bags of money to such corrupt officials as Hamid Karzai.

The reason for tapping drivers is ironically the success of fuel efficiency standards. The Highway Trust Fund contains a 18.4-cent federal gas tax, but the advances in cars has reduced such revenues so the Congress has to find a new way to tap drivers without using the word “tax”.

The highway trust fund will face a $63 billion shortfall over the next four years. That is a fraction of the money that we burned in Iraq and Afghanistan and continue to throw abroad.

Of course, citizens could move to secede to Iraq and ask for their highways to be built for free on no-bid contracts.

On another example of how such fees can impact families, we recently received a return payment on our Virginia taxes. Rather than send a check as in the past, Virginia now sends you “Way2Go” debit cards from Mastercard. However, if you try to get the money transferred to your bank or make inquiries you face a series of potential charges. For example, if you call five times, they charge you. (We try to reach the contractor repeatedly and we cut off or misdirected — triggering the penalty). If you lose the cards (which is easy because they look like free credit cards), you are hit with multiple charges. You can only inquire a couple times about your balance or . . . you guessed it . . . you are charged. It appears a system designed to get citizens to pay charges to a contractor, a prospect far more likely for the elderly. The charges seem wired into the system — added charges that are treated not as a tax but administrative costs imposed on taxpayers. Again, despite the time and hassle of getting the money transferred, we were not concerned about the charges. However, we immediately thought of the many elderly taxpayers who will either not use the cards, throw them away in ignorance, or fall into the trap of these hidden charges: all this to get their money that was over-paid to their government. Here is a list of the charges, but you will have to use the Virginia Department of Taxation website.

Source: Washington Post

127 thoughts on “Obama Administration Moves Toward Tolls On Interstate Highways”

  1. Paul, You don’t trust the govt.? What are you…intelligent?

  2. Former BC – I am personally leery of giving the government more information then they need. Not sure I would give the state my banking info unless I set up a separate account for it.

  4. Annie,

    You made the Top Three! I’d count that as a win. Hope you’re celebrating.

    1. I have asked this question before, what is the contest, where are the rules and who does the judging?

  5. Jonathan,
    If the return was for your VA income tax, you could have requested direct deposit and avoided the debit card nonsense.

  7. feyman,

    Here is some text in the link in my comment you responded to:

    Read this following quote slowly, remembering that it was done while the exorbitant costs of war were not being included in the budget a few years back, while everyone was smitten with bubbleosis, that economic disease which says this economic universe is expanding forever baby, and while we were in the love of war daze:

    AT $286.4 BILLION, the highway bill just passed by Congress is the most expensive public works legislation in US history. In addition to funding the interstate highway system and other federal transportation programs, it sets a new record for pork-barrel spending, earmarking $24 billion for a staggering 6,376 pet projects, spread among virtually every congressional district in the land. The enormous bill — 1,752 pages long — wasn’t made public until just before it was brought to a vote, and so, as The New York Times noted, ”it is safe to bet that none of the lawmakers, not even the main authors, had read the entire package.”

    That didn’t stop them from voting for it. It passed 412 to 8 in the House, 91 to 4 in the Senate.

    (Boston Globe, August 2005, emphasis added, see also PBS Transcript). Once again, why didn’t the greatest infrastructure spending in fiscal history not help the economy?

    (Mega Infrastructure Bill To Make Jobs?</a).

    I had to remove links inside the quote because here only two are allowed, so if you want to follow them up, go to that link.

    But what is interesting is that it would take 286,400,000,000 tolls of $1 each to match that amount, and this is a thread complaining about tolls.

    That means every man, woman, and child in the United States would have to go thru a toll booth about 900 times each to match that amount.

    Straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel?

    Where did that money go … crickets?

  8. feynman

    Dredd, I was listening and thought it an interesting point. Any way to find out? Asking in advance for a link, if possible.

    Thanks
    ==================
    I put a link in my comment.

    But one post cannot cover the trail.

    I followed billions of dollars to the UAE, Iraq, and Afghanistan where infrastructure was being upgraded there.

    It reminds me of Rumsfeld, on 9/10, just before 9/11, at the Pentagon saying they had lost track of a couple trillion dollars and did not know where it was.

    I tried to track the money that was supposed to be for American infrastructure, but the greatest spending bill on infrastructure (during Bush II, just before the great collapse of 2008) but I am not an investigative reporter so I have to rely on the Internet.

    It is still a mystery but I am still looking.

    If Obama had done that it would cause an uproar in Issa and Ryan’s out-House committee work schedule.

  11. Well lets see. I am funny this way, but how long would it had taken to set up a NATIONWIDE referendum in the 1940’s? A minimum, several months. We would have had Japanese on the west coast of the US by that time This is a REPRESENTIVE DEMOCRACY. We elect people who, within the framework of our Constitution, make these decisions. This is 8th grade civics. And, many believe the biggest mistake Hitler made was declaring war on the US after we declared war on Japan. This “referendum for war” is in the Top 3 most ludicrous ideas I have see in my tenure here.

    1. Nick, Most wars are unjust. We provoked the Japs and knew well in advance they might attack. It is not a ludicrous idea of have a referendum and it would not take us more than a week to prepare and hold an election, if threaten with war. You cannot trust elected representatives who are more the servants of the military industrial complex, then of their constituency.

      But you know all this all ready. This is not 8th grade civics either?

  12. Corporations don’t pay taxes. Consumers pay corporate taxes.

    Interstates were paid for long ago. Where is the money? We comingled funds and used the money for the war on poverty. We fought the war on poverty and poverty won.

    We don’t own the freeways but we own the welfare state where everything is free in the workers paradise. Nature provided us with capitalism. Criminal mentalities provided us with collectivism. The latest cogitation on how to obtain other people’s money is toll roads.

    Here’s an idea. We make every person who has ever received payment or valuable benefit from the American taxpayer pay it back. Sort of a reverse tax. What if all the taxpayers that paid for the war on poverty were paid back by the beneficiaries of the war. Oh! You can’t get blood out of a turnip, you say. Well why then do we give turnips free money?

  14. Americans were in favor of entering the war after Pearl Harbor was attacked. In a referendum Americans overwhelmingly would’ve voted to go to war, IMO.

  15. Very doubtful that we would not have authorized war WWII. Pearl Harbor settled it for the Japanese and the rest fell into place.

  17. Dredd, I was listening and thought it an interesting point. Any way to find out? Asking in advance for a link, if possible.

    Thanks

  18. War by referendum. What a great idea. We would all be speaking Japanese and German.

  20. More tolls. I know. I’m working on an EZ-PASS hybrid solution.
    In the mean time more traffic pattern studies are required.

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