More short-sighted idiocy from our state house gang. The public transit system is in really bad shape, but of course the Pennsyltucky Repugs don’t want to pay for it:
HARRISBURG – After months of debate, the state House failed to pass legislation Monday night that would have provided $2.3 billion to complete long-overdue repairs to the state’s aging transportation infrastructure.
In a stunning 103-98 vote that teetered between passage and defeat until the last moment of the roll call, lawmakers shot down an amendment to fix thousands of substandard bridges, repave hundreds of miles of crumbling roads, and pump hundreds of millions into modernizing mass transit systems across the state.
To pay for the improvements, the bill would have lifted the cap on the oil-franchise tax – which could increase prices at the gas pump by roughly 27 cents a gallon. The measure also would have increased driver’s-license and vehicle-registration fees beginning in 2015, and put a surcharge on speeders and others who violate traffic laws.
User fees—-increased gas taxes, vehicle-registration fees, etc.—-are fine, but what about increasing the taxes on the profits made by the energy companies? Or limiting the percentage of profit that the energy companies can make in any one year? Sales Price minus the Cost of Production (wages, machinery, rent, etc.) equals Profit. The easiest way to do this is to nationalize the energy companies. In other words to take them out of private or corporate hands.