Yesterday afternoon, House Speaker Sal DiMasi said local aid might as much as 10 percent this coming year. Gov. Deval Patrick and Senate President Therese Murray wouldn't commit to that figure, but agree that drastic measures may be forthcoming.
As NoPolitician said here yesterday, this move would be bad for the cities and towns that rely on aid to fund their services. But it's also going to be ugly for taxpayers in more affluent municipalities.
As a compromise, DiMasi said that the Legislature may allow towns to tax telecom companies on telephone poles. Verizon and Comcast will be loathe to lose any of their profits to cities and towns during a recession, so they'll raise rates or create a fee for those who use their service. Therefore, you'll be paying.
DiMasi also suggested that he might allow communities to enact meal taxes. Again, you'll be paying. As will the small business owners who run the restaurants and will see their already-dropping business fall off further when diners see another tax on their bill at the end of the meal.
I understand that every level of government is struggling to make ends meet. But it can't keep asking individuals to shoulder the burden. Maybe our local leaders should take another page from the Obama playbook and ask voters to get together and figure out a solution to the problem that doesn't involve taxing the bejesus out of residents. I'll bring the tequila to get the creative juices flowing.
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p>The dumb is here and it is us. Sane economic policy, like that advocated by Keynes (and now Krugman) is the way out this mess. We ought not to be beholden to this truly insane notion of balanced budgets in every circumstance. This invidious notion is only exacerbating an already dire situation.
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p>Instead, to move the cart we kill the horse, hoping, against hope, that some ill-conceived notional ‘balance’ makes us both moral and righteous however hungry and listless we become as a result. As we contort our already over-complicated taxation schema with one-off ‘meal taxes’ or seek for niche revenues to patch up the holes in that mealy blanket we call ‘social services’, that dead horse doesn’t move. No matter how much we beat it, it’s done.
I’m looking forward to reading more of your contributions…
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p>The federal gas tax is currently 18.4 cents per gallon, the same value it was set to by President Bill Clinton on August 10, 1993. FYI, if that tax kept up with inflation, it would be 27.2 cents on August 2008.
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p>My question to you is: What should the federal gas tax be?
I think it should be greater than it is now, but less than whatever would bring it to $4 a gallon. How’s that for an equivocation? Maybe I should get into politics.
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p>I say this because there’s state taxes to factor in in addition to the federal take. Drivers in states like Connecticut, which charge a fortune in gas taxes, would be hurting big-time if the feds hiked their share. Not to mention the state government, which would suffer for decreased revenue as people cut back on driving.
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p>We’re going to have to get super-creative to solve these big problems. Just taxing the hell out of people won’t work anymore. Cutting services and budgets won’t be enough. Like I said, I’ll bring the tequila and we should figure something nutty out.
$0.184 < Amy D gas tax < $2.50
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p>For the record, gas in Hartford is $1.70 as of today. I hardly think that they’d “be hurting big-time” if the federal gas tax went form 18.4 cents to 48.4 cents — bringing up the price of gas in CT to a whopping $2/gallon.
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p>Put another way, no matter what people are paying now, a 10 cent increase in the price of gas would cost people about $1.40 more each week.
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p>Sure, states have varying tax rates, but relative to $4/gallon, there’s absolutely no federal tax increase even considerable which would bring the current price of gas anywhere near $4/gallon. Since the price of oil fell due to the recession, if/when it gets to $4 again it will likely come with much better financial times…
is to cut spending. I know that approach is frowned upon here in Massachusetts, but the fact is that any other way of making ends meet requires raising governmental revenues. There is no way to raise revenue that doesn’t ask individuals to shoulder the burden, either directly (tax raises) or indirectly (business taxes that simply get passed on).
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p>What DiMasi and company are doing here is classic bureaucrat, they’re simply passing the buck to the town level to deal with instead of cutting some of their own bloated budget.
Please bring the price of gas back to $4/gal through taxes. Actually it should be a sort of indexed system where the tax is reduced if actual gas prices increase, so that prices don’t reach European levels, but are enough to continue to shift transportation preferences away from private automobiles and towards smarter growth, public transportation and bikes.
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p>We have to meet our carbon reduction targets somehow, and imposing a tax on bad habits to pay for better more efficient transportation infrastructure seems like the most logical way to do it.
When they set the gas tax, put an automatic inflation trigger in there to adjust for inflation. Stomv says it should be $.272 per gallon by now so let’s put it there and raise it by the inflation rate every year. Having it go to $282 the following year would be met with little resistance if we knew it was being used for infrastructure (and not fucking Police details at $50+/hour).
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p>I just did a dry run of my taxes for 2008 and I think I’m gonna vomit!
I want to emphasize that I think the gas tax should be higher than $0.272 per gallon. The number mentioned comes from the 1993 gas tax, if it were ratcheted up with inflation.
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p>That written, I don’t think the gas tax should jump too quickly. I’d actually propose raising the gas tax by one cent per gallon per month, indefinitely. It would therefore be predictable, which is important for future capital expenditures, since even if the price of a barrel of oil is seemingly random, there’s no reason to add more noise. It would also make it very clear that we should expect the price of gas to continue climbing, and that fuel efficiency is important as a public policy goal.
We were just talking about this the other day here. Take all the proceeds from a new gas-carbon tax and use them to reduce income taxes, so that you end not paying anything more. If you drive less or an efficient car, you’d even make money. If you drive a hummer, well, then you pay extra for your fun.
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p>The reality is that we really really can’t wait anymore to do something about climate change. I give lectures to kids around here and show them graphs of CO2 rising, from 280 preindustrial, to 385 now, and ask them what they think it should be. They usually answer 300 or something. The reality is that best case scenarios now have us leveling off at 500ppm. But we’re currently on the worse case scenario path (meaning we have done pretty much nothing but increase our CO2 emissions), blowing right past that 500 mark.
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p>US automobile consumption is the biggest and really one of the most straightforward things to start working on.
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p>This is classic short-term versus long-term mindset problems. If the politicians choose the short-term (more procrastination), then we all lose. This revenue neutral idea gives the politicians an option that if presented to the public correctly, will not hurt them politically.