Raising Your Taxes, Automatically

We love our roads in Wisconsin.

So much, that we’ve got more of them than most other states. And we pave more of them. And we spend much, much more on them.

We have 21 miles of roads per 1000 residents in our state – 17th most in the nation. Eighty-two percent of our roads are paved – 6th highest in the nation, and more than double the ratio of paved roads per capita in Michigan and Illinois.

And we pay for it. In 2002 (the latest data available), we spent $557 per capita on our state and local highways – 35% more than the national average, and 14th highest per-capita road spending in the country.

That’s just the state and local spending. In all, including federal money and bonding, we spent over $2.2 billion on roads last year – not including the $370 million Governor Doyle raided from the Transportation Fund to support other spending.

The excessive bonding concerns me: last year, the debt service on all the money we’ve borrowed for roads was over $137 million. That figure is growing an average of 10% per year. It’s reached over 12% of the transportation budget, and counting. Very shortly, the payments on our debt will be larger than what we borrow every year.

So we’re spending a lot on roads. We’re borrowing to spend even more on roads. One might begin to think that maybe, just maybe, we could slow down our spending on roads.

One would be wrong – at least, according to the spending interests who can’t imagine spending less on anything.

Most of you already know that Wisconsin’s gas tax rises automatically by the rate of inflation every April. Every April Fool’s Day, to be exact.

Last year, it was 29.1 cents a gallon. This year, it’s 29.9 cents (plus the thre-cent PECFA fee, for a total of 32.9 cents per gallon). Automatically, with no debate, no vote. No legislator ever has to put his or her name on the line to support raising your taxes. That’s the law in Wisconsin.

It’s possible that, finally, this could change. We could see an end to the automatic gas tax increases this year, if the Legislature and Governor listen to the taxpayers, rather than the spending interests.

I wrote about the history of the gas tax in Wisconsin in March (click here to read it), just before the last automatic increase. The automatic increase started under Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus – a Republican who was elected on a fiscally conservative platform, but who later supported tax increases instead of lower spending.

Over the years, there have been attempts to end the automatic increases. I’ve authored a few of them, myself, and I’ve supported the others. They’ve never come anywhere close to passing, even with Republicans in power in both houses.

Now, Senate Republicans are planning to vote on a bill to end the automatic increases. The bill should be up for a vote next week. Thank you, Senator Tom Reynolds, for your dogged determination.

If the Senate holds the vote, and if it passes, it will be hailed as a conservative victory. We should be asking why it took so long.

It will also create tremendous pressure for the Assembly to follow suit. The next question will be: do we cut back spending to live within our means, increase debt (as we’ve been doing), or, as the spending interests would like, find an even greater revenue source to fund more and more for transportation.

Now that repealing the automatic gas tax has momentum in the Legislature, the move will be on to find other creative ways to get more money from the hard pressed taxpayers of Wisconsin. Perhaps Wisconsinites could afford to spend only 25% above the national average on roads, for a savings of $236 million that the taxpayers will get to keep.

That’s what I’ll be fighting for. I hope others in the leg will follow suit.

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Lasee’s Notes is a weekly column by Representative Frank Lasee, 2nd Assembly District, covering events in the Legislature and statewide.