DALLAS - Bipartisan groups of legislators have introduced separate bills aimed at restoring the future solvency of the Highway Trust Fund, including one in the House that would increase in the federal gasoline tax by 66% and one in the Senate that would obtain revenue from a temporary repatriation tax rate on an estimated $2 trillion of corporate overseas earnings.
Both transportation funding measures, offered on Thursday, would provide the additional billions of dollars needed each year to support $40 billion of annual revenues from federal gasoline and diesel fuels taxes dedicated to the HTF.
The House proposal, H.R. 1846, would increase the current federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon and the diesel tax of 24.4 cents by linking them to inflation since 1993, the last time the taxes were raised. The higher taxes would take effect on Jan. 1, 2016.
The bill's sponsors said the new rate of approximately 30 cents per gallon of gasoline and 40 cents for diesel would generate an additional $27.5 billion over the next 18 months, or enough revenue to keep federal transportation funding at current levels.
The gasoline tax bill is sponsored by Reps. Jim Renacci, D-Ohio, Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., Reid Ribble, R-Wis., and Dan Lipinski, D-Ill.
"We need to act now to fix the broken system," the four lawmakers said.
The House plan would provide an advance of $11 billion from the general fund to keep the HTF solvent through the end of fiscal 2015. The transfer would be repaid from the additional revenues generated by the fuels tax increases.
A bipartisan, bicameral transportation commission would be created to develop a more permanent solution to the HTF's fiscal woes, Pascrell said. If lawmakers do not adopt the panel's funding recommendation within three years, another inflation-linked tax increase would be mandated.
Congress has relied on short-term extensions and more than $60 billion of general fund transfers since 2008 to keep the HTF functional "and the result is we have a transportation trust fund that will be empty in two months," he said.
"No one has the guts to do something about this," Pascrell said.
The current transportation funding law providing a short-term fix of the HTF's solvency will expire May 31.
Without a permanent solution, Congress will be forced back into a cycle of temporary patches to the HTF, Pascrell said.
"I think that would not be good," he said. "It creates greater anxieties about what are you going to do down the road when the money runs out."
The repatriation proposal, S. 981, by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who is not seeking reelection next year, would offer U.S. corporations a 6.5% tax on overseas profits that are returned voluntarily. The repatriated revenue would be deposited in the HTF.
Companies would have five years to bring in the profits, but must begin in the first year.
Paul said the Invest in Transportation Act of 2015 is a "fiscally responsible approach to providing the necessary resources to correct the shortfalls" in the HTF, the main source of federal highway and transit grants.
"Our nation's highways and bridges are in desperate need of repair and demand our immediate attention," he said.
The repatriation proposal would boost the economy and provide additional revenue for the HTF by "bringing back hundreds of billions of American dollars currently sitting offshore back to America," Boxer said.
A Boxer spokesman said a revenue estimate from the repatriation proposal will not be available until the Joint Committee on Taxation scores the text of the proposed legislation.
The Congressional Budget Office's latest long-term projection puts the annual HTF revenue shortfall at $13 billion in fiscal 2016, $14 billion in each of fiscal 2017 and 2018, and $15 billion by fiscal 2019. Revenues dedicated to the HTF in fiscal 2015 are expected to total $39.6 billion with expenditures of $53.9 billion.
