Not necessarily disagreeing with you about the roads but the federal government is largely not responsible for their maintenance. Instead each state is supposed to maintain them and it breaks down even further to individual counties. Your state and sales taxes are generally where the funds come from for road maintenance. Many cities have a one cent addition to the sales tax that gets voted on every couple of years just for this purpose.
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· 5 years ago
Yeah, and speaking as a pricing analyst whose actually seen a lot of city budgets--cement and tar are some of the cheapest things a city can buy and especially just tarring to repair roads/streets is not expensive--even moreso if city utility workers do it. Either your city has crippling financial issues or your city government is screwing you.
Mine just keeps repaving the same main roads every year even though theyre nearly new already while less traveled roads go completely untouched for 15 years.
I'm not American, so I'm not 100% percent on the way your taxes work, but I would imagine roads are likely state and municipally maintained, and your property tax may be municipal as well.
Also by car tax do you mean insurance?
Either way, if your roads are shit you should make sure you're complaining to the right people.
Recently Texas closed a loophole in the transportation budget that took money for roads and gave it to education. Consequently... um ... well, education is still being funded about the same and now TXDOT is finally going after subsistence roads that have always been passed over for rehab because of low ridership. Safety is the #1 decider on which roads get fixed. Potholes are an inconvenience but loose gravel in a curve kills.
Also, It's not because a politician lives on a road that it gets maintained, it's because that road gets 2,000 vehicles a day plus 15 oversized loads and the surrounding road are less used. Prejudiced as my opinion is... (am a TXDOT engineer).
Where I live there are the most billionaires living in one place, more millionaires per square mile than almost anywhere on earth- and near these peoples homes are terrible roads on a place known for having very good (for the US) roads. They are as bad or worse than roads in low income areas that see heavy traffic and constant large trucks but are in sleepy little hamlets and private neighborhoods. The more “middle class” areas have beautiful roads. State roads are generally good too. Why? Simple. Taxes. The wealthiest people shelter most or all of their income from taxes in ways poorer people can’t. So it’s the middle class hoes who are paying taxes and so their roads get fixed. The richest people avoid taxes and so their local governments don’t have the budget for things like that. Right up until recent history the ultra wealthy paid their share and we built new highways and bridges and schools and were expanding infrastructure. When the new tax system came out suddenly.....
..... there we’re record numbers of personally wealthy people and lots of budget gaps..... people like to point out that tax “loopholes” exist because they aid commerce etc. yes. As part of a ballanced system. A system that allowed those loopholes because the top earners were being taxed 60% compared to lower earners paying 20%~. They dumped the top tax brackets in with people making 100x less and kept adding tax breaks for the highest earners while pushing that rhetoric from when the system was designed so that tax breaks in that bracket were justified. When a large group is no longer paying their share of what they earned of course things fall apart.
Also by car tax do you mean insurance?
Either way, if your roads are shit you should make sure you're complaining to the right people.
Also, It's not because a politician lives on a road that it gets maintained, it's because that road gets 2,000 vehicles a day plus 15 oversized loads and the surrounding road are less used. Prejudiced as my opinion is... (am a TXDOT engineer).