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Most Americans do not drive solely on city/town roads, we rather frequently take highways and interstates which are federally subsidized - not mostly paid for b
by verall 3y ago
Most Americans do not drive solely on city/town roads, we rather frequently take highways and interstates which are federally subsidized - not mostly paid for by city taxes.
You or your city may be exceptions, you might drive only on city roads, but the parent comment's point about subsidies is broadly correct.
- bombcar 3y agoFederal taxes come from ... citizens. Even the fuel taxes come from ... citizens. There's not some magical source of funding that doesn't eventually come from taxes.
- kube-system 3y agoI don't think anyone here is under the impression that government subsidies don't come from taxes. The criticism above is that subsidies skew the observed relative prices of transport at the point of use.
- bombcar 3y agoIf I am reading https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/FHWA_Budget_Estimates_FY23.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/F... correctly (and I'm almost certainly not) the budget in 2023 was $60 billion (which to be fair includes more than just highways) and if this is correct (which it may be biased) https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-trust-fund-and-how-it-financed https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t... then federal fuel taxes raised $43 billion of that. It's within 2/3rds (and frankly lower than I thought, $60 billion doesn't get you @#@^ these days).
- verall 3y agoYes, but I think the poster's point was that their locality maintained the roads using tax dollars collected from the locality - i.e. their local roads are sustainable system. All US dollars are created by the US government, the ability of the US government to create valuable dollars comes from the tax base, so of course everything eventually goes back to taxes. But it's not really relevant to the point.