Ryan Expects Short-Term Highway Bill

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DALLAS - Congress will not find the revenue needed to fund a multi-year federal transportation bill before the most recent short-term fix for the chronically insolvent Highway Trust Fund lapses in two months, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., said Thursday.

Ryan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the $13 billion to $16 billion a year needed to supplement gasoline and diesel taxes dedicated to the HTF has to come from a broad corporate tax overhaul that cannot be accomplished quickly.

Another quick fix of an as-yet unspecified duration will be needed to keep federal reimbursements flowing to states for transportation projects while lawmakers figure out the long-term solution, he said.

"If tax reform is going to be a piece of the highway bill, we're going to need to go past May 31," Ryan said in a briefing to reporters. "It is just not conceivable, the way this place works, that we'll get it done by then."

Talks are underway on how to fund the short-term extension with Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Ryan said.

The current HTF extension adopted by Congress in late July 2014 was accomplished with a $10.8 billion transfer from the general fund.

The transfer will be offset over 10 years with $3.5 billion realized by extending for one year some custom fees that were to expire in 2023, and more than $6.3 billion from corporate pension smoothing, which increases employers' taxable income.

Extending the HTF through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2015, would require an estimated $10 billion. Congress has transferred $65 billion into the HTF from the general fund since 2008.

Ryan said he wants to avoid a mandatory reparation tax plan on corporate foreign earnings like the one that provides half the funding in President Obama's proposed $487 billion, six-year Grow America Act.

He also is opposed to increasing the federal gasoline tax to generate the additional revenues needed to bring the HTF into balance.

Overseas tax reparations could be used to supplement the HTF, but only as part of a broader reform package, Ryan said.

"Everything's on the table except for raising taxes," he said.

The Senate adopted a fiscal 2016 budget policy resolution late Thursday night after rejecting some 700 amendments, including one by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that would have raised the bar on gasoline tax increases.

Amendment 863 would have required 61 votes, rather than 51 in the 100-member Senate, to raise the federal taxes of 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel or to levy any other new taxes dedicated to the HTF.

"Setting the vote threshold at 60 rather than 50 is a reasonable change to the current budget that would require Congress to think twice before charging the American people more at the pump," Lee said.

Raising the federal gasoline tax would not solve the HTF's solvency problem, Lee said.

"It ignores the structural flaws in the status quo that make our transportation system so expensive in the first place, ensuring states get less value back from the Highway Trust Fund than they put in," he said.

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