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Gabrielle Gurley at The American Prospect writes—The Long and Winding Road to Replacing the Gas Tax. Can Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg persuade Congress that highway person charges are the following large income factor?
Pete Buttigieg has parachuted in for a mushy touchdown on the Division of Transportation. There have been no Betsy DeVos-esque moments on the Rhodes Scholar’s affirmation listening to. “You already know what the hell you might be speaking about,” gushed Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, close to the top of the previous South Bend mayor’s two-and-a-half-hour appeal offensive. That offensive has additionally taken Buttigieg to late-night discuss exhibits and movie star newsmaker applications, the place he’s commiserated concerning the unhappy state of American infrastructure and what the Biden administration plans to do about it.
However feel-good tv blots out the issues of a sector cracking underneath the load of early-Twenty first-century inaction. There’s a gorgeous lack of urgency in Congress concerning the digital insolvency of the Freeway Belief Fund, which shores up roads and public transit with gasoline taxes that have been final elevated in 1993 and will not be listed to inflation. President Biden and Secretary Buttigieg are on the spot to plot interim measures to deal with the diminishing returns of fuel taxes as vehicles develop extra fuel-efficient and electrification looms—or to give you one thing higher.