Maybe we should listen to the following two credentialed individuals
and not believer everything Scott Walker and our “citizen” partisan republicans are saying about jobs and the economy.
William L. Holahan is emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Economics at UW-Milwaukee, and Charles O. Kroncke is retired dean of the College of Business at UWM. They are co-authors of “Economics forVoters.”
Besides trashing supply side economics and highlighting the
hit consumer demand took when public employee pay fell dramatically, they nailed it on Scott
Walker’s problematic borrowing for transportation.
As it turns out, Walker is not just determined to continue our
addiction to fossil fuels, he's also making things worse, whether he knows it or not:
An increase in the gas tax would both add revenue as well as create proper incentives for efficient use of our road network. The current proposal to use borrowing to fund much-needed road repairs needlessly subsidizes drivers and encourages over-use. The gas tax works like any price, requiring drivers to treat the roads like a scarce resource. Roads deteriorate as they are used, so it makes sense that drivers should be made to pay for what they use. Under the current proposal, borrowing to fix roads crowds out pro-growth borrowing to invest.
Walker’s lawsuit to stop the EPA’s actions to move our
economy away from coal (which is getting more costly because we’re now
exporting it to other countries), raising the base rate on customer utility
bills instead of charging more for over-use, and preventing drivers from seeing
a need to purchase more fuel efficient vehicles by keeping the gas tax low, are
all long term costly moves a real “fiscal conservative” would object to.
They're not objecting. Talk about being in the (gas) tank for Scott Walker. Just as bad, an increase in our registration fee instead of a gas tax, forces Wisconsinites to pay for out-of-state drivers use of our roads. That's a huge revenue stream I'd like to tap.
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