It is not necessary to raise gas (or any other) taxes in order to fund transportation projects. I-912 sends the politicians in Olympia an important message: when voter priorities shift, we expect budget priorities to shift. That means that funding for newly important priorities (and transportation infrastructure certainly counts) should come from cuts to less important programs, not new taxes. For example: if we were to reduce state spending on Medicade to its level 10 years ago, we would save in 4 years all the money that the gas tax increases are scheduled to produce in the next 16.

yes, cutting your way to fiscal solvency has certainly worked for the bush administration.

the real fact is that this gas tax simply keeps up with inflation and, with the increase, we won't even get close to the level gas was taxed in the 1950's.

wake up. when infrastructure is cut it costs lives and it costs us economic growth. why do you think big-business is against i-912? why do you think first responders (who won't get a DIME of the tax) are against i-912.

face the fact, you'd rather save $75 a year than help your state avoid catastrophe and help your state's economic growth.

this won't send a message to olympia at all. what it'll do is make the gas tax in washington regional. we'll have ghetto-zed roads in this state. king county will have a modern infrastructure and the rest of the state will end up with roads like they have in idaho.

I'm a 91 year old gink who is mildy computer illiterate. I just joined the better-donkey group and would someone tell me the name of the city, town and state from which the site eminates. It all sounds great, and I thoroughly enjoy what Amy writes. Thanks for letting me join up.....Incidentally, the name Zentner is a measure of weight that pertains to 100# of potatoes, in Germany.I use it since I sometimes I am (s)mashed, boiled, fried, chipped, or creamed, but not all at once. I also weigh in at approximately 100#....Greetings, everyone

How is Medicaid not a priority? How is HEALTHCARE not a priority? Or is it that you don't think Medicaid is a priority because you've been fortunate enough never to have to need it? Medicaid is, after all, the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with limited income.

And before we look at the increase in state spending on Medicaid as some sort of mismanagment on the part of Washington State government, let's whip out Occam's Razor and arrive at the most likely conclusion:

The federal government has cut funding for state Medicaid programs, and the states have had to make up the cost out of their own budgets.

Also-- let's broaden our viewpoint a little, shall we? Let's say federal funding for Medicaid doesn't change, and let's say Washington State does as you suggest and decreases spending on Medicaid to the level it was at 10 years ago. What happens?

• More people get cut from the Medicaid roles, and thus fewer poor people have access to preventive medicine
• More poor people will have no choice but to use the emergency room as their doctor-- but won't be able to pay
• Hospitals will have to absorb the cost of care
• Hospitals will negotiate with insurance companies to make up the difference, raising rates for everyone
• Hospitals will spend their scarce resources on paying for the people Medicaid won't
• Public and charity hospitals will go bankrupt at a faster rate and be absorbed by for-profit hospital systems
• The new for-profit hospitals will pick and choose their patients because they can, and even fewer poor people will have access to medical care

I don't want to be responsible for all of that. Do you? I doubt it. So let's think a little more carefully the next time we oh-so-casually suggest that the way to keep people from dying (on the 520 bridge during an earthquake) is to let more people die (from infections that could have been treated with antibiotics if poor people just had access to them).

Thank you so much for joining our commumnity, Zentner-- we are glad you're here!!

We're emanating from Seattle. In Washington State. In the United States. Of America. :)

Keep stopping by and comment whenever you want on whatever strikes you-- we are looking for a lively discussion here.

Man, I cannot believe someone would suggest cutting medicaid on this website. You're opening a whole new can of worms.

You are certainly free to argue that Medicaid should be a higher priority than transportation. I would only point out that, for a long time, government provided transportation infrastructure but no medical care, and society did not collapse.

Whatever your highest priorities, I submit that they should be met out of the present budget, i.e. by cutting spending on lower priorities. For the last 50 years, we have tended to fund new priorities by raising taxes instead of de-funding old priorities. The result has been that government has taken a steadly increasing fraction of the GDP. (Another poster correctly point out that the gas tax is lower than 50 years ago, but he ignores the fact that tax burdeon as a whole is significantly greater.)

There is a simple reason that initiatives rolling back gas taxes and car tab taxes and requiring voter approval or legislative supermajorities to raise taxes are so popular. It is that the majority of Washington voters agree with me that government's "take" is big enough and that goverment should fund new projects by cutting old ones.

While I don't think that putting Medicaid on the chopping block will solve any more problems than it creates, I think that this is a good conversation to have. Governing is about priorities and sometimes programs outlive their usefullness and need to be de-funded. So why don't we ponder that question here at BD? Let's assume, for the sake of arguement that the I-912 does pass. What program would you not mind the state cutting, or at least cutting back, to allow at least part of the transportation work to get the money?

I do wonder about those who want to send this or that message to Olympia, particularly when the message they want to send is the least obvious message "Olympia" could take from I-912. The people who make me wonder the most are those who want a transportation package that does even more congestion relief, yet won't even pay for this package. In your case, you're voting against the transportation package to tell Olympia to take money out of other programs and put it in transportation.

Let's be clear about what we're voting on in November. There's no reason Carlson/Wilbur couldn't have written an initiative to roll back the increase in Medicaid spending and reduce the sales tax by an equivalent amount or cut the estate tax and cigarette tax. If you followed the budget negotiations in Olympia this past session, you probably noticed that the general budget and the transportation budget are treated separately, and we fund them from different taxes. The gas tax hike was voted on with the transportation package it funds, because like just about every state, that's the way we fund roads here. A gas tax is one of the fairest ways to fund roads because it is paid by those who use roads roughly in proportion to the amount they use them. If you want to get the politicians in Olympia to cut Medicaid, what good does it do to go after a tax our state constitution prohibits them from spending on Medicaid?

The result has been that government has taken a steadly increasing fraction of the GDP.

Do you have any figures on this? I know that sales taxes, while they grow faster than gas taxes, grow more slowly than the GDP. In a quick google search I wasn't able to find figures on state taxes as a percentage of GDP, but I was able to find information on state taxes and personal income here. It seems that, while it varies from year to year, taxes have dropped relative to personal income every decade since at least the 1960s.

Just fucking gut it. We waste all of that money every year to keep people for doing what they are going to do anyway, regardless of how well you fight it. Just get rid of it. It's another failed policy that made no sense at it's inception, and makes absolutely no sense now.

Thanks for your considered response. Your suggestion is excellent, especially considering that nearly everyone agrees that I-912 is likely to pass.

As an aid to the discussion, let me point out that there are essentially only 4 things that the state spends money on:

Education (K-12 + universities): 20.1B

Human Services (mostly Medicaid): 18.7B

Transportation: 3.6B

Government Operations (Judges, Police, Burocrats): 3.5B

So suggestions like "cut the defense budget" are not germane. (These figures for the 2001-03 biennium are from the state's Office of Financial Management.)

You make an excellent point. I must admit that I-912 doesn't clearly state "yes to transportation improvements, but funded via cuts instead of new taxes". On the other hand, I do think that the accumulation of all the recent initiatives in Washington does send a pretty clear "no tax increases" message. And, putting yourself in my shoes, if the most important message you wanted to send to Olympia was "no tax increases", wouldn't you agree that voting yes on I-912 would do a better job of that than voting no?

Now to your entirely reasonable request for data to back up my assertion that the overall tax burdeon is increasing. I also wasn't successful in finding long-term historical data for Washington state, but it isn't hard to find data at the federal level. In 1930, at the dawn of the new deal, federal spending was 3% of GDP. By 1940 that had risen to 10%. It peaked at 25% durring WWII, then fell back to 15% by 1950. It rose slowly to 20% around 1970, and has held steady at about that level ever since. So unless state spending dropped from 17% of GDP in 1930 to 0% today, the total tax burdeon has increased significantly.

Ah, I found a data source on federal + state + local spending as a fraction of GDP. It is this report, which is actually a pro-gas-tax study. It contains a table that shows that federal + state + local spending rose from 20% of GDP (15% federal + 5% state & local) in 1950 to 30% of GDP (20% federal + 10% state & local) today.

A friend of mine pointed me to this site, which lists the projects that will be funded by the gas tax, if it is not repealed, by county.

Another thought... Eric L noted that "the general budget and the transportation budget are treated separately, and we fund them from different taxes. The gas tax hike was voted on with the transportation package it funds, because like just about every state, that's the way we fund roads here." So if I am reading this correctly, cutting medicaid funding would not actually free up more money for transportation projects, because it is in a separate budget. I agree with Adrienne that it is useful to think about what other budget priorities may no longer be relevant... but if these are different budgets, then we should not be talking about these things as trade-offs.

Something that has occurred to me while thinking about this issue is that because our gas tax is a cents-per-gallon tax, it inherently can't keep up with inflation the way the many other taxes do. I remember someone arguing (maybe in a letter to the editor? I don't remember) that the gas tax increases with population (more people buying gas = more gas taxes) so we shouldn't need to increase them. That would be true if we had population increase but no inflation. More people driving also equates with more wear on the roads. So the government needs gas tax revenue to keep up both with the increase in population growth AND with inflation. Anyone have any figures on how the gas tax, or, perhaps, spending on transportation projects in Washington, has varied over the years when adjusted for inflation?

There is a 1944 Amendment to the state constitution requiring that all gas tax revenue be spent on roads, but not requiring that only gas tax revenue be spend on roads. If state lawmakers did want to commit to funding roads entirely from the gas tax, they could hold state spending constant by cutting the sales tax (and corresponding spending from the general fund) by an ammount equal to the increase in the gax tax.

The report I linked to in an earlier post contains historical inflation-adjusted gas-tax data.