By Heather Smith | grist
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are posted for discussion purposes only.)
The Highway Trust Fund is in trouble. No one wants to raise gas taxes, so the fund is running out of money. Its current funding will expire Aug. 1, yet the two houses of Congress are not particularly close to an agreement.
Reading about all this, I found myself feeling strangely delighted. I thought of the story a friend once told me about how, when she was a child, the funeral home in her neighborhood caught fire, and she became convinced that no one was ever going to have to die again.
Of course, it’s not that simple. The highway trust fund also includes a Mass Transit Fund, and a Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) trust fund, which I am sure qualifies as one of the most misleading acronyms ever. The two other programs only get a fraction of what highways get; most recently, the combined transit/highway funding split has been about 20 percent vs. 80 percent, and arguably the new legislation will make that split even wider — more like 6 percent to 94 percent.
