Election Disadvantage

Gas Tax Link 2NC

Transportation infrastructure is funded by a gas tax --- that is massively unpopular

It's hard to claim that America's transportation system is in great shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers says the United States has a $3 trillion backlog on transportation projects and it costs drivers in traffic jam time, wear on cars and damage to the environment. But how are we going to pay to improve it? Emil Frankel, visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, joined Kerri Miller on The Daily Circuit Wednesday. "We have an aging, congested, deteriorated system," he said. But one thing politicians can't seem to agree on: How to pay for upgrades. Richard Geddes, associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, also joined The Daily Circuit discussion. "We have not always underfunded road repair in the country," Geddes said. Taxes on gasoline have always been a strong source of funding for transportation infrastructure projects as long as there were more drivers using more gasoline, thus paying more taxes. That isn't the case anymore, Geddes said. "The main [reason] in my view is the increasing fuel efficiency of vehicles, which means that people can drive more vehicle miles, but don't pay proportionately more in fuel taxes," he said. So should we increase the gas tax? Geddes said it's a "political bomb to go out and advocate for an increase from the federal gas tax." "At least part of the reason for that is people's lack of faith that the revenue from an increase from a gas tax would be spent wisely by Congress," he said. Geddes referred to the 2005 highway bill, which included 6,371 earmarks and the notorious "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.

Ext – Transportation Spending = Gas Tax

Money does not materialize from thin air --- the plan is funded by a gas tax.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, let me restate the obvious: We all know that the highway trust fund is insufficient to maintain the country's current transportation infrastructure, let alone improve it. Lawmakers would be more than happy to bolster spending for highways, railroads, and bridges if only they could make the dollars materialize out of thin air. Meanwhile, economists and transportation-related business and labor groups all seem to land at the same answer for raising the money--a fuel tax increase, either per gallon or per miles traveled. Last week, the chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan debt commission proposed a 15-cent per-gallon gas tax hike to fully fund highway infrastructure. A few days before the draft debt commission outline was released, Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, proposed a 25-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase.

Normal means for funding transportation infrastructure is a gas tax.

Highway Trust Fund proves that the plan is funded by a gas tax.

3. Gas taxes are unnecessary because the transportation system is paid for in other ways. Not so fast.

America's transportation system is going broke. Revenue for the Highway Trust Fund is derived almost entirely from federal gas taxes and distributed to all 50 states. It covers nearly 80% of the capital costs of federally-funded transportation projects, with states carrying the remainder. From 2008 to 2010, Congress transferred $34.5 billion from general fund revenues to make up the funding shortfall. This stopgap measure was necessary to continue projects that are already in the works. Moreover, deferred maintenance—the failure to care for existing roads and bridges—combined with lost productivity are estimated to add more than $100 billion to the national deficit annually.

Ext – Transportation Spending = Gas Tax

Gas tax is the traditional mode of funding for transportation infrastructure.

Perhaps my favorite part of the budget is the Department of Transportation's section (pdf). Readers know that I think infrastructure investment is, at this moment, the biggest no-brainer in the economy. The need is great, the workers are plentiful, the money is cheap, and the material costs are low. And the administration is proposing quite a lot of it: $556 billion over six years. That includes a $50 billion bump in the first year's funding to maximize job creation at a moment when unemployment is high, a $30 billion infrastructure bank, a $32 billion Race to the Top program to encourage states to develop ambitious and innovative reform proposals, and more. It's good stuff. The question is how we're going to pay for all of it. Traditionally, the underlying law -- the Surface Transportation Assistance Act -- was funded by increasing the gas tax. And when I say "traditionally," I mean beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1982. Yes, Reagan increased the gas tax to fund infrastructure investment. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both followed his lead on that. Then came George W. Bush, and for the first time, the law was reauthorized and given new funding without being paid for. The connection between infrastructure investment and its traditional funding source was severed.

Ext – Gas Tax Unpopular

Funding infrastructure raises the gas tax --- that is massively unpopular.

What’s wrong with America’s transportation situation? In large measure, it's the gas tax. The federal gas tax is a primary means of funding highway construction and maintenance. The problem is that it is not indexed for inflation, so while road repair costs creep upward, the gas tax stays the same. While that might be good news for American pocketbooks, it's devastating for America's highways. The tax was last increased in 1993, meaning that drivers are paying more than a third less into the Highway Trust Fund than they were at the beginning of the Clinton administration. Moreover, the sluggish economy, high gas prices, and environmental concerns have led Americans to drive less and to buy more efficient vehicles. The lower demand for gasoline has further cut into federal taxes. The result has been neglect of America's roadways, according to the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission. Its 2009 report suggests that the federal government needs to spend roughly $100 billion per year to maintain and improve its infrastructure. The Senate transportation bill offers $109 billion over two years. “The gap between what we’re investing and what we need is just enormous,” says Rob Atkinson, former chairman of the NSTIFC. “And they make almost no effort to address that.” The problem is that paying for American infrastructure more fully means raising taxes on someone. One solution, pegging the gas tax to inflation – or raising it outright – would risk further angering Americans already angry about gas prices. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed 65 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Obama has handled gasoline prices, compared with 26 percent who approve.

71% of the public rejects a gas tax to fund infrastructure.

• Voters are far less accepting of proposals that would affect their own wallets. Seventy-one percent (71%) say it would be unacceptable to increase the federal gas tax; majorities also are opposed to placing a new tax on foreign oil (51% unacceptable), replacing the federal gas tax with a mileage fee (58%), and adding new tolls to interstate highways and bridges (64%).

Ext – Gas Tax Outweighs Public Support for Infrastructure

Even if the public supports the plan, they don’t want to fund it with a gas tax.

Link Shield – Public Distrust

The public distrusts claims that transportation spending is needed

Despite support for infrastructure, the public distrusts that funding will go to useful projects.

In a study earlier this year commissioned by the HNTB Corporation, a firm that provides architecture, engineering, planning and construction services, 81 percent of Americans surveyed said they agreed that making sacrifices to pay for infrastructure improvements now will make the difference between “a more prosperous or a more difficult future for the next generation.” Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they were willing to pay more in taxes to support highway and bridge maintenance and new construction to reduce traffic congestion. But how much more will Americans pay? The survey said the average American is willing to pay $22 a month to reduce the time spent in traffic by 20 percent. The survey further indicated more Americans trust state government above the federal or city governments and private sector companies to manage and maintain infrastructure projects. Yet 61 percent of respondents said they were not confident taxes they pay to build roads in their area are used well and actually make a difference. 4 That distrust in how tax dollars are spent is not helped by the public perception of what happened the last time Congress considered a transportation authorization bill, according to Washington State Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond “All anybody remembers (from 2005’s SAFETEA-LU bill) was the ‘bridge to nowhere’ and earmarked funding for something that people have decided—whether it’s true or not—is a waste of money,” said Hammond, who chairs AASHTO’s National Transportation Marketing Campaign Task Force and is a member of The Council of State Governments Transportation Policy Task Force.

Link Shield – Public Priorities

The public does not perceive transportation as a high priority --- they distrust that the government would accurately spend the money.

Finding the resources to keep transportation infrastructure in good order is a more difficult challenge. Unlike traditional utilities, roads and bridges have no rate payers to fall back on. Politicians and the public seem to attach a low priority to fixing aging transportation infrastructure and this translates into a lack of support for raising fuel taxes or imposing tolls. Investment in infrastructure did not even make the top ten list of public priorities in the latest Pew Research Center survey of domestic concerns. Calls by two congressionally mandated commissions to vastly increase transportation infrastructure spending have gone ignored. So have repeated pleas by advocacy groups such as Building America’s Future, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Nor has the need to increase federal spending on infrastructure come up in the numerous policy debates held by the Republican presidential candidates. Even President Obama seems to have lost his former fervor for this issue. In his last State-of-the-Union message he made only a perfunctory reference to "rebuilding roads and bridges." High-speed rail and an infrastructure bank, two of the President’s past favorites, were not even mentioned. Why pleas to increase infrastructure funding fall on deaf ears There are various theories why appeals to increase infrastructure spending do not resonate with the public. One widely held view is that people simply do not trust the federal government to spend their tax dollars wisely. As proof, evidence is cited that a great majority of state and local transportation ballot measures do get passed, because voters know precisely where their tax money is going. No doubt there is much truth to that. Indeed, thanks to local funding initiatives and the use of tolling, state transportation agencies are becoming increasingly more self-reliant and less dependent on federal funding

Link Shield – Cannot Spur Voters

Small government advocates are gaining momentum on transportation spending --- the transportation lobby cannot spur voters.

Link Booster – Pork Barrel Spending

Transportation spending is pork laden and is perceived as deficit spending.

Transportation infrastructure must go through Congress and will get pork attached to it.

High Speed Rail Links

Obama’s mismanagement of HSR generates public skepticism.

All of the comments so far have missed the central point in the high-speed rail (HSR) debate: that it is not the merits of high speed rail that are the issue but the Obama Administration’s handling of its HSR initiative. It’s the flaws in the Administration’s approach and its misleading rhetoric, rather than the appropriateness of HSR technology, that are the key reason why the press and public opinion have turned skeptical and why Congress, on a bipartisan basis, has refused to fund the program two years in a row. The Administration’s inept handling of the program was the focus of a December 6 hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I thought our exchange on high-speed rail could benefit from taking a fresh look at the Committee’s conclusions.

Independents don’t want a federally funded HSR.

HSR lacks public support

There are reasons for doing that – the biggest one being the federal funding on the table. But for all the money and business plan problems the high-speed rail project, its biggest problem is public support. Such support is slipping in recent polls. And if the public won’t support high-speed rail, it has no hope of being built. Building the first link in a less-populated area of California won’t help that. (Even high-speed rail folks in Spain, quoted in a joint project by various California media organizations this week, seemed aghast at the decision to start in the Central Valley, instead of where people are).

GOP will spin HSR as expensive

HSR lacks public support --- voters are skeptical about paying for it.

HSR unpopular – costs have risen

High Speed Rail – Link Shield

Link shield – support for HSR is ephemeral because of costs.

Highways Links

The public rejects new highways --- they prefer improving existing infrastructure

Keystone Links

Keystone will be a highlight of the election.

Building Keystone would alienate environmentalist --- a key part of Obama’s base.

Where the issue becomes more tangible and therefore trickier for Obama is when the multiple choices become binary. The debate over the proposed XL Keystone Pipeline that would transport Canadian oil through the nation’s heartland to the Gulf of Mexico crystallizes the choices involved and forces a shades-of-gray conversation into starker hues of black and white. Obama recognizes that the devoted environmentalists who represent a critical portion of the Democratic party base need some motivation to turn out for him in the fall. But he also understands that centrist voters who support him on a range of other domestic and foreign policy matters could be lured away by a Republican opponent who either promises relief at the gas pump or who can lay blame at the White House doorstep for those higher prices. Even more complicated is the role of organized labor, which has poured immense amounts of support into Obama’s re-election but also prioritizes the job-creation potential of the pipeline.

Keystone is politically toxic to Obama.

Ext – Keystone Kills Environmentalist Support

Keystone approval will crush environmentalist support

Mass Transit Links

Mass transit is expensive and is associated with wasteful spending.

Mass transit does not have a lot of public support --- this makes it easy to attack politically.

Port Security Links

Port security is unpopular --- high political cost with very few returns.

The second constraint is related to the first: Political incentives to take action in port security are weak. From a politician’s point of view, port security emergency response planning is the worst of all worlds: It requires extremely high up-front costs for benefits that will be realized only in the future—most likely when the official is already out of office—or perhaps never. In addition, making homeland security policy requires making tough choices about where to dedicate limited resources. These are exactly the kinds of choices many politicians try to avoid. When such choices cannot be avoided, longer-term planning usually takes a back seat to shorter-term gains. Consider, for example, a mayor who must decide whether to dedicate additional police officers to lowering the crime rate or enhancing counterterrorism surveillance at the port. Any politician with a reasonably developed sense of selfpreservation focuses on crime and leaves port security for another day. Moreover, even within the area of homeland security, electoral incentives create sub-optimal policy outcomes. The natural impulse of any elected official is to focus on issues of greatest concern to constituents. This sounds good in theory. The problem is that it works poorly in practice. Most California citizens are concerned about terrorism, but few have visited the port complex or worry about its security, and fewer still pay close attention to the details of how elected officials handle the arcane details of CERT training or cross-agency coordination. Instead, since the September 11 attacks, the public and the press have focused their concern on higher-visibility targets such as LAX and the security of local drinking water supplies. The misplaced allocation of homeland security dollars can be seen at every level of government. In December 2004, former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin articulated this in a report titled “Major Management Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security.”

Public-Private Partnership Links

PPPs are massively unpopular --- the public fears diversions and higher costs.

Public Opinion of PPPs

AT: No Link – Not Congress

Congress is normal means for transportation infrastructure investment.

AT: Link Turn – Plan is a Win (Jobs)

Transportation spending is a hard sell --- voters do not perceive it as an economic generator.

At the moment, it can safely be said that building support for increased transportation spending is not the president's top priority, as he heads into a general election with the economy just showing signs of recovery. Infrastructure funding—and what were once packaged as stimulus projects, generally—have taken a back seat to, say, the price of gas and, by extension, the conspicuously expanded drive for domestic energy resources. The lesson that Obama and the administration seem to have taken from the times they have pushed hard for spending on big transportation-infrastructure projects is that they're a tougher sell than expected, or at least that voters don't necessarily see them as the economic generators they eventually become. So, for example, the president insisted that the federal stimulus act include $8 billion for high-speed rail, but then absorbed a great deal of grief over ensuing allocations, which were criticized as politically motivated.