The Lynchburg News & Advance has some curious intel as of late — a candidate for governor would love to raise your taxes (again) for transportation projects.
So there’s the shot. The chaser? Frank Wagner would like to make it a priority as a Republican governor.
What makes it worse is that as a Republican governor, Wagner absolutely believes that only a Republican can sell out lead in just the right way to pass such an enormity.
The target? Your gas tank…
“If it’s a Democrat, the House will kill it. You know it, and I know it. Have a Republican carry it, wear it on his sleeve,” he said.
Wagner is fresh off the 2017 General Assembly, where one of the legislature’s main responsibilities was reworking the biennial budget to fill a $1.2 billion budget gap.
“They’ll tell you, we’ll just streamline government to get it. Well, we just streamlined government to the tune of $1.2 billion,” said Wagner, a Senate Finance Committee member and one of the conferees who negotiated the final spending plan. “It’s pretty streamlined, you know.”
What’s even better about this? Didn’t we just go through and embarrassing and painful 2013 McDonnell transportation tax hike that supposedly cut the state gasoline tax by a smidge (17.5 to 16.2 cents per gallon) and imposed an additional gasoline wholesale tax? That was at least the sugar in the medicine to help the McDonnell transportation tax hike go down at the time according to proponents such as Wagner.
So what’s the Wagner tax hike schematic look like? Not only does it keep the 5.2% wholesale tax, but proposes to reintroduce and increase the old 16.2 cent per gallon gasoline tax to an as-yet-determined rate!
Now we’re all pretty smart folks here, so pop quiz. A state budget with $1.2 billion dollars of fluff to be rearranged in an off-year in the biennial budget is, by definition:
(A) Streamlined (the best streamlining… and Wagner knows streamlining).
(B) Mostly streamlined.
(C) A budget with enough fluff to go find solutions there and not in our wallets.
If you answered (C) you just might be a Republican. If you answered (A) or (B) and really think that tax hikes are part of the answer to Virginia’s budget woes — or more accurately, the government’s budget woes — then there’s a party out there that believes what you believe, Frank.
…it’s just not the Republican Party, is all.
More to the point, does it strike anyone as particularly galling that one of the first things Wagner would do is sell out Republicans to a tax hike that doesn’t even begin to address, oh I dunno… the disconnect between land use decisions and state transportation spending for instance?
Or the disconnect between economic development and land use? Or the lack of regional planning or co-operation among localities that don’t required a fourth layer of government by way of unelected spending authorities?
Let’s face it — the problem with transportation in Virginia aren’t in the amounts of money we are throwing at the problem. The problem is what we’re doing with the money… and throwing more money at the problem isn’t going to make the sloth go away.
Is Wagner suggesting that we throw money at Virginia’s transportation problems? Sadly, yes…