Oregon to dabble in per-mile road tax

kanaric wrote:

No one asked why they can't make do with what they already take. It's assumed without question that if the roads are bad, more money will fix them.

Would it not? If there is no funding for the roads clearly more money would fix them. That is how budgets work. "I want good roads but I don't want to pay for them!" If i'm at my job and we need 30 TVs to view live streams and we don't have a budget the TVs don't get ordered and they don't go up. Then we get more money allocated and we can complete the request. And yes these TVs are required for this place to work just as much is roads are required for you to get to work. If you want Oregon or whatever to become Illinois where you have road tolls. Either the private company that now builds your roads because you hate the government charging you for them or the government never having money for the roads so then charge you for driving on them. This is the result of how things work. If you are not spending money because the roads are "fine" the money for the roads goes away in terms of tax cuts or spending increases elsewhere. If the money is gone and you need to rebuild the roads then you need to get the money for the roads. You the voter and the people you vote for care only about the here and now. They don't care having money set aside for these roads for years to come. If the money is there it WILL go in the ways I described. That's just the results of democracy. Sure we could become a dictatorship like China and have vast long term plans for things but that's just not how America works. This is effectively "toll roads" except without the infrastructure of toll booths and employees that unnecessarily leech money. My dad's friends bitch about the roads in Illinois all the time and are against toll increases, but want their medicare and social security to be secure, and want to cut taxes lol. They want all the entitlements, all the advantages of government, whine when the police get cuts, but want to pay LESS. You pay less you get less services. Sorry.

Hi Kanaric,

What happened to the trillion dollars (That’s $1,000,000,000,000) we pi$$ed away just a few years ago on “shovel ready jobs”. Remember how highway repair was specifically identified as a primary allocation for the funds. I don’t get it, do you not remember that or do you somehow think things will be different this time.

I want good roads, I understand nice things cost money, and I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for them but until you can explain how we just spent $1,000,000,000,000 on fixing the roads and all we got were a bunch of signs that say “we’re fixing the roads”, you can’t expect anyone to trust that they’ll get anything for their money…it’ll just be pi$$ed away again.

In reply to kanaric:

Would it not? If there is no funding for the roads clearly more money would fix them. That is how budgets work. "I want good roads but I don't want to pay for them!"

That is not how a budget is supposed to work. With a budget, you are supposed to allocate funding to the highest priorities first. Once the needs are taken care of, you can buy wants. If you run out of money, you don't get your wants. Ideally, you SAVE the money that you don't don't need to spend, so you have it the next time you need it. That is a budget.

What the government calls a budget... Try to spend every dime it takes to justify the need for more next year. There is little to no incentive to spend money wisely. Then they tell you that the crappy roads are your fault for not giving enough. When they do take more, they still don't fix the roads.

If the government ran your job, they would buy coffee makers instead of TV's. The coffee makers would sit unused in boxes in the closet. The next year, they would buy more coffee makers. You don't get your TV's, because they ran out of money and they need a bigger budget. You can't do your job because you don't have your TV's. But you don't care, because they pay you well and give you good benefits.