ATA Pleads With Congress For Higher Gas Taxes

American Trucking Association President Bill Graves went before Congress yesterday to ask for higher gas taxes to keep the federal highway fund from going broke.

Graves says that the trucking industry, which paid $16 billion in fuel taxes in 2013, should be paying more. According to Graves, the reason that Congress is having such difficulty finding the funds to maintain the highways is because the fuel tax (24.4 cents for diesel) has not been raised since 1993, which has failed to keep up with inflation.

Graves told Congress that for the past 22 years, they have been using stop-gap, temporary methods to find the money to maintain highways, but that the time has come to find a more stable solution.

Paul Ryan, chairman of the committee was not a fan of Graves’s plan, stating simply, “We’re not going to raise the gas tax.”

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Sources:
Huffington Post