Gas tax - Hren answers Boardman

[NC Republican Party Chairman emailed me this response to George Boardman’s 29oct17 column for publication.  It appears that Mr Boardman missed an important point or two on the new CA gas tax.  gjr]

George,

Your column yesterday was OK but very incomplete and inflamatory.  You failed to mention why there are no funds for road repairs in the gas tax account.  The gas taxes collected were diverted by the super majority in Sacramento from the gas tax account to the General Fund and spent on anything and everything the General Fund covers.  Thus, road repair disbursements could not be made to counties this year.

Of course, the natural reaction of those now in the super majority in Sacramento when there are insufficient funds is to raise taxes.  So, gas taxes will rise tomorrow, diesel fuel taxes will rise, and soon we all will pay about $100 more on average per year for auto registration.  Anything that is transported in our state will cost more, leading to an inflationary impact.  And, next year under the new law, the gas tax will rise again.  The new law has NO provisions to assure the collected gas taxes will not continue to be diverted to the General Fund.  Plus, the increase in gas tax is a regressive tax that hits lower income folks much harder than middle and upper incomes.  That is because many people cannot afford to live where they work, thus must drive longer distances.

So, your statement is really outrageous where you say the opponents have no answer to get money to fix our roads and want to return to horse and buggy days.  That is crazy and defamatory (but I am not filing charges).  The answer to where to get the funds for needed road repairs is to stop the raids on the gas tax funds.  Simple as that.

Bob Hren

Chair, Nevada County Republican Party

Comments

[Account Deleted]

It's actually far worse than that. Not only does the CA govt siphon off money into the general fund that was supposed to go for road maintenance, the monies that are collected from motorists that were originally to be spent on highways are instead spent on 'transportation projects'. Basically, car drivers are subsidizing other projects that have nothing to do with roads and highways other than physical proximity.
And it gets even worse. The cost per mile to plan and build a mile of freeway in CA has risen from the 1950s to now at a rate that far outstrips inflation. Since the 1950s, technology has reduced the cost of engineering a road to a pittance compared to what it used to cost. Yes - some of the increase can be understood in the rise of cost of acquiring land and other design features that didn't exist in the 1950s but the main rise in cost is various externals such as paying off local communities for such road-related items as community centers and the like. Another factor raising the price of new roads as well as normal road maintenance is CEQA and the numerous hires that go ahead of any project spending money as if it were water on such necessities as local cultural history studies and neighborhood educational and re-locational efforts.
Please don't think for a minute I'm picking just on poor ol' CalTrans. The whole rest of the CA state govt runs on more dollars per minute than most foreign countries.
Brown's laughable and criminally miss-named HSR project will prove to be one of the most expensive boondogles that any govt anywhere can imagine. And don't even get me started on criminal raiding of special funds to prop up the general budget. Even judges can't get the CA govt to obey the law.
And has CA ever paid back the unemployment insurance money to the feds that Obama let them slide on?

[Russ]

In the four years, I was a County Transportation Commissioner; the state borrowed the Transportation Fund to fill shortfalls in the General Budget. To my knowledge, the state has never repaid the borrowed funds for the four years I was on the Commission. I wrote my District Representative, Keven Kiley about the unrepaid funds, and he was going to investigate, but never got back to me on the results of his query.

Part of raising the fuel prices is to have funds for the electric vehicle subsidies. It is all social engineering to make owning an internal combustion engine more difficult, in the hope you will buy into the electric vehicle cult. The Federal subsidies are going away, and CA needs funds to make up the deficit. Without subsidies, EV sales plummet to near zero in other countries. Gov Brown is aware of the result and requires a CA subsidies program to maintain the EV parade.

[Bonnie McGuire]

It used to be against the law to use money collected to pay for specific purposes to be used for something else, because there wouldn't be enough left for what it was intended to benifit those paying. What a con job. Gov. Brown said the fund was so rich there would be no need to increase taxes, license, etc if the money could be used in the General Fund. The suckers believed him and it wasn't long after they voted for it that there wasn't enough money left in the Transportation Fund, because someone neglected to include when the borrowed money had to be repaid. Lyndon Johnson and followers did the same thing with the "incredibly" rich Social Security Retirement insurance everybody pays into.

[Todd Juvinall]

Hey everyone, remember the democrats stole our gas tax money for good things. Educating illegals, sanctuary cities, and free medical for scofflaws. How can we be against such wonderful uses of that money we thought was going to the potholes?

[Todd Juvinall]

Oh and slimming down the jail inmate populations was to save u too but the powers that be used that for sex change operations for males to females in the clink.