taxes that are directly allocated to roads and bridges? Not nearly enough. Believe me....I want less government and less taxes in general but the condition of our roads, bridges, infrastructure is a joke.
I agree to a certain extent. I see counties in Iowa defer highway maintenance for years.
Part of our problem here is that in Iowa the IADOT seem to be unaccountable to anyone and so the order of the day is job preservation. In order for road engineers to preserve their jobs they need to be actively building new roads, which we really don't need.
What we do need is maintenance, but as with all maintenance it's not glamorous so it doesn't get the lions share of the tax dollars.
Iowa (unbelievably) is already a tax unfriendly state in my book, the govt emergency coffers are at the maximum allowed, why I don't know.
The problem is that if you boost fuel taxes (which they did in Iowa a year ago by a dime) people alter behavior and the amount they expect to collect is never realized. People do remember and when govt enacts new taxes without discussion people get angry.
If you want taxes targeted toward road repair then go after that, but I can't support or endorse more taxing for 'road repair' that gets diverted to something like building new rest stops or to admin salaries. AFAIC IADOT already gets more than they should, I think their compensation is probably excessive.
And I'll be damned if they're fitting a black box to my car to collect for miles driven - the whole concept of that is just so preposterous. As for using phone gps, how do you know which phone being tracked is doing the driving? If there are our phones in the car which one do you tax. That's even a more ridiculous concept.
Either recognize that trucking is the major contributor to road damage and deal with it that way or start collecting for EV miles driven by GPS link with the car. At least the EV's have the capability to of being monitored already built in. Or here's another concept, scrap it all and go to a fair increased sales tax.
You really can't blame the tax payer for crumbling roads / infrastructure. By extension I fail to see how increasing taxing in a system where those dollars are already misdirected gets you anything better? We don't get to pick and choose where the tax dollars go, the govt decides where those dollars go so if you want the dollars to go to repairing stuff then call your representatives at your state house and complain to them. They need to direct the DOT's to stop building new roads and stick to maintaining what we have. When that's all done we'll take a look at new roads...
Steve
