Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Page 9

IN MY OPINION (Column)

Taxpayers Shouldn’t Tolerate Gas Tax Extortion by Transportation Interests

By JON COUPAL

A coalition of government entities and special interests which thrive on transportation dollars recently sent a threat letter to Republican members of Congress because those members have the audacity to oppose the huge tax increase passed by the California Legislature with the enactment of Senate Bill 1. The threat was not well received and, in fact, will likely backfire on the tax increase supporters.

The SB1 tax hike, imposed without voter approval, is very unpopular according to virtually all public and private polling. (A more recent poll claims that repeal of the gas tax is not supported by a majority of Californians, but that poll is suspect for several reasons, not the least of which is that the hike has yet to take affect.) Realizing how unpopular the gas tax is, several Republican members of Congress are contemplating support for a measure to repeal that tax.

Had the letter stuck to issues of transportation policy—such as why California needs to have the highest gas taxes in the nation—it would still have been wrong but at least it wouldn’t have been offensive. Unfortunately, supporters of the tax decided to take the low road and issued a thinly veiled threat that would have been more fitting for an episode of the Sopranos. Specifically, the letter stated, “We don’t think your objective is to create new political adversaries.” Moreover, the letter states that the coalition would “mount a robust and powerful effort in opposition to this initiative, using the voices of California’s business community to counter your efforts.”

As distinguished from the self-interested motivations of the tax increase proponents, including big construction corporations, the California Republican congressional delegation has decided to put the interests of middle-class taxpayers first and they should be commended for it. Indeed, in their written response, they demolish the arguments advanced by the special interests.

It is clear that the tax-and-spend coalition is interested in feeding their addiction to tax dollars and not rational transportation policy. For example, they did not support Assembly Bill 496 which would have re-purposed billions of dollars in truck weight fees and the sales tax revenue from new and used vehicles to address California’s road maintenance backlog. They did not acknowledge that billions from the gas tax swap being diverted into the General Fund should have been returned to our roads. These taxpayer-friendly proposals alone would have provided a stable source of ongoing General Fund revenue without raising taxes.

Not surprisingly, the special interest coalition of government entities, labor organizations and big construction firms are more than willing to throw citizen taxpayers under the bus in their disingenuous claim that the money is legitimately needed to address California’s transportation needs. They choose to ignore that, in passing SB1, they were slamming Californians with the highest gas and car taxes in the nation. They never acknowledged that General Fund spending had increased by $36 billion over the last six years, to a record $122 billion dollars, with not one dime going to transportation purposes.

The political elites decided to force-feed Californians the bill, because in the words of Gov. Brown, taxpayers are “freeloaders” and need to sacrifice more. Try telling that to the average California family who now has to pay $600 more in gas and car taxes annually, or to the 20 percent of the state that lives at or below the poverty line.

Republicans in Congress are well within their rights to respond to a majority of their citizens and demand repeal of SB1 and a right to vote on similar measures in the future. If these local government associations, construction trade unions and “concrete salesmen” truly believe these gas taxes are popular and have majority support of the electorate, there is no reason to either threaten members of Congress or oppose this potential ballot measure. However, their real fear is that their tax dollar fueled gravy train will come to a halt and that voters will force their elected state legislators to do right by taxpayers for a change.