Now walker says no new taxes, so if we implement a gas tax, offsetting tax cuts, sure cut the taxes for the rich and pay for it with a gas tax, no tax increase except on the average Joe, Then lets do tolls! Under the study’s projections, a motorist would pay between as little as $2.72 or as much as $8.16 to travel from Madison to Milwaukee. Not a tax? Stop taxing and costing the working people so the rich can increase their wealth, what would you spend a million dollars on anyway?
You complain about Walker a lot but you never lived under an idiot like Paulente, and now it sounds like he wants to come back. Nope. Like a place I used to work at, the third rule was once you leave you never come back. Between “once is Pa-lenty” and “goofy Dayton”, “user fees” on cigs got to $3 a pack. Not a tax though but for our own good. Not as bad as NY or Canada though.
Seems to me though I do remember paying tolls on 39 south from Madison to Illinois. Somewhere along there they collect a toll and think it is still Wisconsin. I guess I have gotten a little soft on tolls with a transponder and reasonable rates. Its not that I like it but its better than the constant complaints and uncared for roads. Especially better than annual mileage taxes like some are talking about. Roads gotta be funded one way or another but I don’t want foreign or private ownership, and want the money strictly for the roads and not bike trails.
“user fees” on a pack of smokes is your measure of a governor’s effectiveness . . . ?!
At least IL repealed the 1 cent per ounce soda tax, If you want to be unhealthy we will make you pay! Going green may cost you also, Electric cars, plus Trumps 30% tariff on solar panels. https://blog.caranddriver.com/the-tax-man-cometh-these-10-states-charge-extra-fees-for-electric-cars/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-tariffs/job-creator-or-job-killer-trump-angers-solar-installers-with-panel-tariff-idUSKBN1FB30B
The EV road tax is surprising, but only that Maryland isn’t on the list.
I don’t have a problem with states charging user fees, which are what gas taxes typically are. As you may know, people that use home brew biodiesel fuel have to pay taxes as if they bought the fuel at the gas station, except that tax time is when the fees are due, as I recall. It is reasonable that EV owners should pay taxes for the road equivalent to the fuel tax on average mileage driven annually. The fee should not be more than it would be for about 12,000 miles of gasoline tax. It should be a user fee, not a penalty.
The article you posted is 14 months old.
Considering that Wisconsin is the 6th or 18th most progressive in its income taxes depending on how you compare it, are you just ranting?
Wisconsin’s roads need repair. Money’s gotta come from somewhere. While I hate tolls because they bugger up traffic flow, they do shift the costs directly to the user. But then so do increased gas taxes, which I prefer, since they target users that cause the most damage - trucks - more than cars.
Toll roads rearing their head again, and yes ranting
Wisconsin’s gas tax is 32.9 cents/gallon. 17th in the US. Michigan is 5th at 40.44 cents/gal and should have arguably as crappy roads as Wisconsin. But then so should Minnesota and their gas tax is only 28.6 cents/gal. Wisconsin had been diverting its gas taxes to other types of projects.
I noticed that the former governor diverted $1.4 billion from the gas taxes to pay down debt and fund other projects, something Walker corrected by passing a constitutional amendment that all gas taxes go to road repair. Seems like the previous governor kicked the can down the potholed road and now the current administration’s gotta make up for that.
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Somebody’s got to pay, that’s a certainty. The voters decide the question by who they vote for. As long as the voters are making the decision who pays for the road maintenance and repair by majority rule, I have no difficulty with what each state or community decides.
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I don’t believe in raising any taxes until all waste and corruption is totally eliminated. If that means jailing a boatload of bureaucrats then so be it.
OK is on a tear now to raise fuel, energy, cigarette, and I don’t know how many other taxes because of the “dire situation” we’re in.
A year or so ago the OK Dept of Health was whining to the heavens that people were going to be tossed out of nursing homes, medical services cut to the bone, and so on as they were “30 million dollars short”.
It came out right before Xmas that said Dept. of Health “lost” 30 million dollars; never to be found. Now the finger pointing and resignations have begun and they’re still demanding more funding…
Education is one of the loudest groups demanding more and more. In the meantime 60% of graduating HS seniors need remedial courses to enter college.
The school now has 165 students Pre-K through HS. To manage this mob hey have 4 principals, 4 secretaries, 3 speech pathologists, and a golf coach, A staff of 40…
The school district I live in has one of the highest per capital spending on students in the state. For this we get an average ACT score of 18+.
Some of the small school districts around here even have a Skeet coach. So yes, they’re hauling a bus load of juveniles around with a mountain of shotguns and shells. I seem to remember Tom and Ray at one time were on a Save The Skeets mission…
Anywho, enough of my rant…
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I imagine open road tolling is a way to tax users by usage, but if put into effect would it reduce the gas tax? I have seen how this works, gas tax will not be reduced, some other taxes will be reduced, maybe, and not tax reduction for the average working person, so now you will have tolls and gas tax. Walkers idea is to make the rich richer, so no tolls without offsetting tax cuts, won’t help me a bit. I understand wanting to make EVs pay their fair share, but consider school tax, we sent our daughter to parochial school, and paid the school tax, the roads and schools are for the common good and should not be user based.
One measure of a tax, tax efficiency, is whether the tax is paid by those who most use the public resources funded by those taxes.
By that measure, highway tolls are about as efficient as you can get, because those who don’t use those highways aren’t burdened by their upkeep.
My GPS app has a setting for “avoid tolls.” When you turn it on for long trips, you get to take the scenic routes. It makes for a nice trip.
Would you really cut off your nose to spite your face? That freeze in spending doesn’t address fraud at all, and if it blocks healthcare to those who need it, you can cost taxpayers more than you save if your cuts lead to more ER visits.
It sounds to me like what you need are fraud investigators, because you’re suggesting punishing the innocent along with the guilty, and that sounds neither fair nor effective.
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During the summer months, a group of kids from the Florence High School show up with their coach to join us shooting in our trap league. We shoot trap, not skeet, skeet is a dying game around here.
I doubt that the school funds the cost of shooting, although ammo companies often provide a break for 4-H and youth leagues. A lot of extra curricular activities cost the students or the student’s parents extra money. I know of people who had to quit marching band because their families couldn’t afford it anymore, and how many people are going to play a mellophone or a tuba in a marching band once they graduate from high school or college?
We just got back from our annual ski vacation and every weekday morning, there was a different school bus in the parking lot with a group of kids falling down on the bunny slope. The resort likely offers a special rate for these students, future customers you know. Very few will become professional skiers, except perhaps as ski instructors or mountain patrols.
On the other hand, how many of you actually had to solve a quadratic equation or use calculus in your professional life?
So what should schools teach beyond reading and writing and basic arithmetic? There is one author who claims that the most important things in life he learned in kindergarten. I can say the same thing for recess.
There is no practical way to collect money for schools except general taxation. Road use offers other practical options for collecting money from those using the roads. We can even collect from non-citizens passing through with gas taxes and tolls.
Bringing it back to cars and talking about schools, how did you professional auto techs learn how to work on cars? Apprenticeship? Trade school? High school auto shop? Self study? Secretly reading an issue of Hot Rod magazine while the history teacher was droning on and on about some ancient war?
I remember auto shop classes. Nearly every high school had one. And wood shop and machine shop.
Ours also had a vocational office worker series of classes, as well as home economics.
You had to apply to enter the programs for the more advanced classes after you’d taken the intro class.
Students went to work as entry level pros right out of high school.
I took distributive education in HS where I basically learned to sack groceries and stock shelves for minimum wage and a HS credit. However the classroom teacher did have the class fill out mock IRS 1040 forms including itemized deductions, which along with the typing class probably did me the most real life good of anything else I learned in HS.
I aced chemistry and physics because I found those subjects fascinating but my life would be little different if I had never learned that stuff.
I learned motorcycle repair on my own, reading a publication called “motorcycle mechanics” during the more boring classes.
A lot of my present job was learned from the job itself and I went above and beyond just learning the motions of the job on my own.
If they really need to add another course in school, I suggest “BS 101” where the class learns to spot strawmen, circular arguments, post/cum hoc ergo propter hoc arguments, goalpost moving, appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, cherry picking, and other stuff like that. Car and other ads and newspaper editorials could be studied in this class.
No doubt @B.L.E, BS 101 and a four semester course in golf plus membership in a fraternity. The greatest asset for an ambitious young person is a comradeship in some brotherhood of successful like minded individuals.
3 year apprenticeship . . . 4 days shop, 1 day classroom
Then after that, after I was working, lots of on the job learning and self-study . . . I won’t bother going into the details of that last part
But I’ll say this . . . what really “stuck” is what I learned on my own time, reading at my own pace
Some guy lecturing in the classroom, getting frustrated when I didn’t immediately grasp a concept, and getting even more frustrated when him simply repeating it over and over again didn’t work . . . nope, that didn’t work for me
I wasn’t into cars in high school
Our high school aptitude test suggested I would be lousy as a mechanic
I’ve been doing this for decades now
So it just goes to show that those predictive tests are just that . . . predictive
Doesn’t mean they’re accurate