Gov. Gretchen Whitmer campaigned last fall on a promise to “fix the damn roads,” and the election returns indicate that the voters agreed. Indeed, if it wasn’t for outrageous partisan gerrymandering, Democrats would almost certainly have also won control of the legislature; they got more total votes than their rivals.
But while Republicans suffered losses, they still have firm control of both the Michigan House and Senate. Initially, GOP leaders indicated they knew the voters wanted Michigan’s worst-in-the-nation’s roads to be fixed, and even agreed new taxes would be required.
Experts from the Michigan Department of Transportation and elsewhere indicate that after years of neglect, an extra $2.6 billion a year is needed to get the roads back to where they should be. In her budget message earlier this month, the governor proposed getting most of that money by raising the gas tax by 45 cents a gallon, in three stages over the next year and a half.
That would supply a little over $2 billion. In many ways, this would be the easiest and best way to do it. It is a tax increase, or perhaps more properly, a user fee, that is clean, clear and easy to understand. There’s a rough justice to it, in that those who drive the most would pay the most. Finally, this would seem relatively painless because the price of gas fluctuates constantly. We paid more than $4 a gallon for a while back in 2008.
Less than two years ago, the price was sometimes under $2 a gallon. What every sane person who understands what’s happening knows is that we have to fix the roads, and soon, if we have any hope of attracting new business and residents to this state.
But Gretchen Whitmer is now learning what President Obama learned ten years ago, when he was trying to get the Affordable Care Act passed. Republicans have no real interest in working together to achieve solutions. They are either blinded by an ideology that tells them to oppose any new taxes, no matter how necessary for the common good, or motivated by a desire to try to discredit and politically destroy Democrats, or a combination of both.
Suddenly, Republican leaders are screaming that there’s no way the poor citizens can possibly stand such an increase in their taxes. They say that we need to try to first try to find money to fix the roads in our current budget, which would be impossible.
Oh, you could get some of it by damaging education and revenue sharing even more than they already have. But even that wouldn’t be enough.
For a perfect example of what passes for their thinking, take a look at an absolutely moronic commentary Bridge Magazine published by a particularly dim Macomb County legislator named Jeff Yaroch, called “my Michigan roads plan won’t break your pocketbook.”
The column is mainly a protracted whine that Macomb County residents pay too much in taxes and pay more than people in other (poorer) parts of the state.
Yaroch’s “plan” consists of an impossibly complex bill that has something to do with funding road repair according to the width of the road, and giving townships more power, and HB 4093, which is only ten lines long, and which would divert $60 million in revenue from “Indian gaming receipts” to the state transportation fund.
Right now we badly need government by responsible grownups instead. Obama wasted months trying to work with Republicans on health care, and in the end, got not one of them to vote for his final bill. Sadly, the governor may be forced to find some other route to fixing our roads, since she’s been saddled with a legislature determined not to play nice, or fair, with others.
