- The transportation budget plan faces opposition from
Democrats at the state capitol.
A Democratic member of the Joint Finance Committee joins us now
from Oshkosh.
Representative Gordon Hintz.
Thank you for being here.
- Happy to be here.
- What is your reaction to Representative Kooyenga's plan
for transportation funding?
- For the past six years the challenge on transportation
funding has been pretty clear.
Revenue has not kept up with inflation and project demand out
there and the legislature needs to address this.
There's been studies.
There's been recommendations.
It's all pretty much known.
What was a pretty clear-cut simple challenge has been met
with incredibly complex plan that increases the gas tax
effectively 23% but it's the part that goes well beyond that.
It seems like the biggest objective of this is to reduce
the income taxes of some of the wealthiest earners in Wisconsin
along with a lot of other things that have nothing to do
addressing transportation.
- How will that be met on the Joint Finance Committee when
it's this really giant package that as you say includes not
just uppers and downers on sales tax on gas and the gas tax but
then this whole idea of introducing a flat tax?
How will that be met?
- Well, I can tell you it's been met by the Democrats on the
committee as a non-starter.
We've been looking for an opportunity to try to work with
Republicans on this.
Two years ago in the budget we proposed at least re-instating
indexing to make sure the problem wouldn't get any worse
and that funding would keep up with inflation.
But this goes so far beyond the any of the recommendations to
address transportation.
And this idea you can significantly reduce the taxes
again, a 50% tax cut for the wealthiest earners in Wisconsin
as some sort of offset for a 23% sales tax increase--er, gas tax
increase doesn't make any sense.
And it just shows you that budget after budget the biggest
priority, bigger than K-12 education, bigger than the UW
System has been these expansive tax cuts for the wealthy and
this is just another example of that.
- Specific to his transportation financing plans
though, are there some parts of that Democrats could support?
- Well, I think if you were to just look at the transportation
proposal and separate the other things I think there are some
elements worth looking at.
I think they give local government some options with a
sales tax a lot of the counties have been asking for as their
roads have increasingly declined.
As state revenue support for those communities
hasn't been there.
But it's hard to get around the fact that their plan, their
transportation plan, was called "The Road to A Flat Tax." In
other words, it seems to be more important for them to erode
future money for public schools and UW System than it is to fund
our transportation shortfalls.
It should be broken up and separated.
And we can evaluate those things but it's a 23% increase in the
gas tax and that's a lot of.
It's a lot of the people who have the oldest, least fuel
efficient cars are some of the lowest income earners in the
state so the sales tax is regressive and unpredictable.
But it is a starting point.
- What do you make of -- so you talk about the increase in the
sales tax on gasoline but he counters that with eliminating 4
to 5 cents in the gas tax.
Would you like it better if the sales tax went up as well as the
gas tax?
- Well, I mean again, the net in the analysis by the Fiscal
Bureau said it would ultimately lead to a 7.2 cent gas tax
increase for $2.40 a gallon.
That's all the public is going to talk about.
We can talk about upper, lower, moving things around
but at the end of the day that's what we're talking about.
I think the real thing that stood out to me
was even with this increase in revenue
there's no new money for any of the road projects.
And a lot of that is because they attempt to restore all the
misguided policies from the last few years trying to reduce the
amount of record borrowing they've done to try to replenish
the money they've money from the general fund to pay for roads.
There's certainly cleaner, easier ways to do it.
And the problem with the sales tax is when gas is more
expensive you're going to pay more with the sales tax.
Whereas if you just increased the gas tax, it would stay
standard on a per gallon basis.
- Representative Gordon Hintz, thanks very much.
- Thank you.