Bill Wayne's Political Pages - The Gadfly
Gadfly 81
Submitted to the Warrensburg Gazette for March 22, 2001


The Gadfly is a series of letters offering commentary on local issues and published in the Warrensburg Gazette.

Dear Editor

Our Missouri House of Representatives can't seem to get enough of trying to raise taxes. A while back I wrote about HJR5, which would make it easier for school districts to go into debt by lowering the ‘supermajority’ requirement at certain elections. This proposed constitutional amendment has passed the House and is awaiting Senate action. If it gets through the House & Senate, we’ll vote on it later in the year.

Now the House is getting ready to pass a package of bills (HB924 & others) to ‘save our highways.’ As usual, they’ve combined worthwhile changes with special fund allocations & spending for special interests. Here’s what the bills would do:

There’s no doubt that our roads are in deplorable shape, in part because the existing money is spread so thinly. The state maintains our lettered roads while equivalent roads in many other states are county-maintained. Another problem is that highway costs keep going up because of oil price changes and federally-mandated wage rates that contractors must pay.

While I question most new taxes, at least the gasoline tax and the vehicle registration fees bear directly on those who use the roads, and the heavy trucks that do the damage will pay a larger share. People who don’t have cars or drive still pay, but only tangentially through increased prices caused by increased delivery costs.

We should all strongly object to using sales taxes to fund highways. Here’s 2 reasons why:

What can we do now? Write our state senators & representatives and tell them to raise new highway money from the people who use the roads - lay off sales taxes!


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