Deteriorating Infrastructure? How about a social security tax holiday?

This post was written for The Ground Floor by Robert Dunphy, senior fellow of Transportation at the Urban Land Institute.

The recent flap over whether to declare a "gas tax holiday" to give relief to drivers coping with astronomical gas prices illustrates how badly we have lost a national consensus on transportation policy.

Just last week, ULI’s new Infrastructure 2008: A Competitive Advantage listed the well known statistics on the poor state of infrastructure -- roads, bridges, levees, etc. and pointed out that the U.S. is coasting on prosperity, headed toward third world nation status. So why reduce the gas tax? State and federal combined is about $0.40 per gallon compared to European country’s levy of $4 or more.

This public dust up confirms what transportation analysts have been saying, that the days of the gas tax, the cornerstone of financing federal highway and transit programs, are numbered. Since there is no longer a political consensus on a national transportation program, it is hard to gain consensus for increased funding other than for pork barrel projects, which are also losing their luster.

During the glory days of the Interstate Highway System, it would have been inconceivable to call a delay in the completion of these roads that were connecting America like never before. The last increase in the federal gas tax was in 1993, so every year it loses buying power to increased costs of construction and operating costs. The transportation community hopes that the gas tax will hold up for one more federal transportation program, scheduled to expire in 2009.

So far, the technological fix seems to be a tax on actual miles traveled, a so called VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tax, which has been tried in an Oregon experiment. Getting the technology in place will require some time, but the politics could take even longer. It is an elegant solution that could also be adapted to special prices during peak or off peak hours.

Meanwhile, how about a holiday on social security taxes?