March 22, 2019 – Senate Budget Committee chairman Mike Enzi today introduced a 2020 budget plan that assumes that Congress will enact somewhere around $85-90 billion in new highway user taxes over five years to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent at baseline funding levels.
March 19, 2019 – In the full fiscal year 2020 federal budget request released this week, the assumptions for the tax receipts of transportation excise taxes over the next decade made by the White House Office of Management and Budget are significantly above the estimates for those taxes made by the Congressional Budget Office. And the Administration once again boosts its overall receipt totals by requesting new transportation user fees that Congress is unlikely to approve.
March 1, 2019 – Yesterday, the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), jointly introduced legislation that would provide temporary extensions of numerous targeted tax breaks that expired at the end of 2017 or 2018.
February 25, 2019 – 100 years ago today, the first tax on gasoline as a motor fuel in U.S. history was enacted by the state of Oregon, as a way to pay for an ambitious road construction and maintenance program.
February 22, 2019 – As we prepare to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the first motor fuels tax by Oregon in February 1919, here is a look at unsuccessful attempts to tax gasoline in Congress from 1914 through 1918.
February 14, 2019 – Yesterday, Sen.
February 9, 2019 – The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of the 116thCongress formally kicked off its work yesterday with a marathon seven-hour hearing entitled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why Investing in Our Nation’s Infrastructure Cannot Wait.”
January 31, 2019 – Projections for transportation excise tax receipts are up substantially in several areas in the new CBO ten-year baseline projections.
January 31, 2019 – The new CBO budget forecast allows us to estimate how much money would be raised by proposals to increase gasoline and diesel fuel taxes.
January 25, 2019 – Both the spending and revenue sides of the federal-aid highway program are very carbon-centric. Is the present highway program compatible with a “Green New Deal”?
January 9, 2018 – Voters across 34 states approved nearly $41 billion in new transportation investments last year, according to Eno’s new issue brief about the 2018 transportation ballot measures.
December 21, 2018 – A $99.2 billion package of year-end tax reductions passed the House of Representatives last night by a party-line roll call vote of 220 to 183. But the legislation (text here) does not appear to be close to the votes needed for Senate consideration, especially this late in the session, so elements of the proposal will have to be brought up again after the 116th Congress takes office on January 3.
December 14, 2018 – This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued its biennial report updating a wide menu of revenue increase and spending cut options and the amount by which each of the 121 options would decrease federal deficits over the coming years.
December 7, 2018 – Three years and two days after the enactment of the FAST Act, the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released their study of the future of the Interstate Highway System commissioned by section 6021 of that law.
November 16, 2018 – In both the Missouri and California gas tax ballot measures last week, much of the credit (or blame) goes to the people who determined the precise phrasing of the titles and short summaries of the measures that actually appeared on the ballot.
November 8, 2018 – Voters approved five of the 10 largest transportation ballot measures by dollar amount this Election Day, with four failing and one still too close to call.
November 7, 2018 – Voters considered over 300 transportation-related ballot measures this Election Day. While Eno will have much more extensive analysis in the coming weeks, key transportation ballot measures generally fared well, with some noteworthy exceptions.
November 2, 2018 – With the related announcement that the Eno Center has finally put the entire 57-year run of Traffic Quarterly (1947-1981) and Transportation Quarterly (1982-2003) online, some of the Eno staff have taken a look through those archives and singled out some articles that they found interesting or relevant.
October 19, 2018 – The booming economy and corporate tax cuts caused a surge in the sales of heavy trucks and trailers in fiscal year 2018, causing gross receipts of the Highway Trust Fund to increase by 5.0 percent over fiscal year 2017.
October 19, 2018 – As part of the Treasury Department’s year-end financial reporting for fiscal year 2018, new reports from the Bureau of the Public Debt show that excise tax receipts for the Airport and Airway Trust Fund grew by 5 percent versus last year, while customs duties received by the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund were up by 9 percent.