To hear Bush talk you think he wants to get us off of foreign oil yet that is
not the case. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is warning that funding to repair
highways is going to be a victim of higher gas mileage and may require a new tax
initiative – including taxing drivers per the mile.

This from

AOL News:

WASHINGTON (Nov. 25) – Taxing hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars and
billing drivers for miles driven are among the approaches being suggested to
avert a shortfall in money to maintain the nation’s highways.

Less than four months after President Bush signed a six-year, $286.4
billion highway and public transit act, a report commissioned by the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce says the federal Highway Trust Fund is running out of
money and Congress needs to think about new revenue sources.

“Decisions are going to have to be made in the very near future,” said Ed
Mortimer, the business lobby’s director of transportation infrastructure,
acknowledging it could be a tall order. The next highway bill is years away
and lawmakers may be loathe to return to a measure that was widely
criticized for being padded with thousands of special-interest projects.

The Senate came to an acrimonious halt recently when a senator suggested
shifting to hurricane relief the money from two Alaskan bridge projects,
including a $223 million project linking Ketchikan to a sparsely populated
island with an airport that critics have dubbed the “bridge to nowhere.”
Congress later removed the bridge from a list of protected projects, but
money for it is still part of Alaska’s share of federal highway dollars.

Article continues

here.

It is bad enough that tax break incentives were reduced in the transportation
bill but now we want to steer people further away from reducing our oil
dependency. Just more lies that come out of our President’s mouth.