Low Taxes?? RoadBuilders Will Fix That!!

Maybe the RoadBuilders have kids going to college, thus an insatiable appetite for MO' MONEY!!

So they trot out George Mitchell to yammer and fuss about the Road Crisis.  You know that Crisis, when your car falls into the gaping holes on the Interstate or State highways and disappears, or when all the bridges fall down just as you are crossing them.

Yah, THAT "crisis."   

You mean you haven't noticed??  Shame on you!!

Having put on over 25,000 miles on Wisconsin and Upper Midwestern roads in the last year or so, I have not seen, nor felt, the Road Decay and Destruction about which Mitchell vaguely imprecates.


So now that Wisconsin's tax burden is at a 50-year low (after 50 years of raping taxpayers), the RoadBuilders are ready to fix that problem!!  How about a nice new dollar-a-gallon gasoline tax??  How about automatic annual increases in the gas tax?  RoadBuilders need to eat well and buy politicians, too!!

Mitchell is not above trickery and deceit in his essays, by the way.

From 2010 through 2018 — a period of GOP control — the share of state taxes and fees devoted to transportation declined 15 per cent.

"Taxes and fees," but not borrowing.  During that period, Wisconsin:

• rebuilt the downtown Milwaukee interchange, 
• rebuilt rebuilt the Zoo interchange, 
• rebuilt Bluemound Rd. from 124th St to Hy. 18,
• rebuilt damn near all of Hy. 41 (now an interstate) between Fond du Lac and Green Bay, 
• is currently rebuilding I-94 from the State line to Milwaukee County,
• and Hy. 441 across the north side of Appleton.
• Oh, and by the way, it's also re-building I-39 from Janesville to the State line.

It should be clear that the RoadBuilders and the State Department of Transportation consume and spend borrowed dollars just as well as taxed dollars.  See the above bullets again if you don't get it.

Mitchell and his underwriters (see above) cry, wail, and moan that the State stopped automaton-gas tax-rape of its citizens in 2005 and then gas-tax revenues slowed down.  Mitchell doesn't mention the reason:  the longest recession in US history--because Mitchell and the RoadBuilders don't really give a flying damn about YOUR problems, you see.

And he buries the fact that gas-tax revenues are STILL large enough to build a lot of roads (like the practically unused Hy. 26 south of Jefferson, or the practically unused Hy. 16 west of Oconomowoc....).  See, only HALF the gas-tax revenue can be used to build or fix roads.

The poor babies....

As far as Mitchell and his donors the RoadBuilders are concerned, paving over the entire State, including the Wisconsin River, is the goal, and ass-raping Wisconsin drivers is the method.

Don't fall for it.