Kaine readies to hike the gas tax

The News Virginian
Published: April 30, 2008

Those who bleed gushers from open veins are unlikely to object to trickles resulting from the infliction of lesser wounds. Pulsing with such gothic rationale, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and his Democratic abettors approach, eyes aglow. As gas prices surge toward $4 a gallon, Kaine is readying for a vampiric push next month to increase the state gas tax, principally to pay for road improvements in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
The ostensible necessity of pilfering more money from taxpayers to augment the $78 billion state government will spend next fiscal year sprung to life in February when the Virginia Supreme Court nixed the ill-advised regional transportation taxing authorities created by the legislature in 2007. That move would have generated $600 billion annually, confining a regional transportation levy primarily to its beneficiaries, those who would travel regularly on the new and repaired highways.
Now the governor has turned his attention to a $1 billion transportation funding shortfall, the timing of which is inopportune given the fact that a Jersey swamp is more expediently navigated than most roads in the state’s northern tip. “We need to respond to congestion in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, and to statewide fill up this maintenance deficit that we have, which is severely constricting our ability to do public transit and new road capacity,” Kaine declared Tuesday on his monthly radio show.
Filling up deficits is something of a specialty for Kaine. So too is creating them. He opened the year with a $641 million budget shortfall, the result of his staff overestimating revenues, a gaffe which they proceeded with haste to replicate. By some estimations, gaps in Kaine’s future budgets could widen to a chasm of $2 billion.
Reducing spending to remove rather than fill up the deficit is an option precluded in the mind of Kaine and his ilk. So for constituents who amid a floundering economy have only the former option, excluding the case of taxes which force the latter upon them, Kaine plans to unveil a proposal within the next 10 days likely to include increasing gas, sales and auto dealership sales levies.
Such a plan does not figure to be greeted warmly by House Republicans, who have vowed their readiness to plunge a stake into the heart of any statewide tax increase. Kaine is undaunted. “We’re doing a lot of listening,” he said. To whom is not clear, but surely not to those who would pay the bill. “I’m going to come out with a proposal in 10 days or so and say, ‘Hey guys, c’mon, let’s solve this problem and do what the voters asked us to do and be leaders.’ ”
Leadership and a proper response to voters, who are seldom heard asking for heavier burdens, could be construed to mean making hard choices on spending rather than government sinking its teeth deeper into taxpayers already wounded and bleeding.
Kaine prefers a distorted facsimile of legendary sportswriter Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith’s summation of the process that drove his art. For the governor, in an altered paraphrasing of Smith: There’s nothing to budget writing. All you do is sit down with taxpayers and open their veins.