I understand State Senators' discomfort with increasing taxes, but I think they made the wrong decision in taking money from the state's cash reserve rather than increasing the gas tax to pay for roads needs. The gas tax is one of the fairest ways to pay for roads, short of setting up toll booths everywhere to directly target the users of a specific segment of road. The cash reserve, on the other hand, is funded by sales and income taxes. The long-standing precedent in Nebraska is to fund our roads budget with money that comes (primarily) from roads users; this decision by the Unicameral puts us on the path to forcing all sorts of state services to compete with roads for budget dollars.
Ultimately, the Unicameral's decision is a shameless ploy to disguise a $15 million tax as "free" money. Taxpayers will still foot the bill, but the burden has been shifted away from those who will most benefit from the funds.
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State Senators don’t have too much discomfort with raising taxes, as 34 of them did just that a couple weeks ago.
Your pay-for-service model would be great, but only if completely applied. That is, only the parents of public school students pay the taxes that go towards schools. Only the people using or benefiting from the new arena would pay for taxes that are inevitably going to increase to fund that. And so on.
Everyone benefits from road money. Everyone. People that work at the businesses I frequent use those roads. As do the police, fire fighters, government officials, and anyone hauling a good or service I might want to buy. It doesn’t matter if I don’t use a particular road or if I don’t have a vehicle at all, I benefit. It’s the same with public education or the army or whatever, our society is better off because it exists.
We can adopt a pay-for-service model of taxation in this country, but I promise you won’t like the result.
“The cash reserve, on the other hand, is funded by sales and income taxes”
Income taxes held in a reserve IS a non-constitutional act, and those taxes should be returned or not taxed at all in the firs place.
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