Searching for a Tolerable Tax

Denvil Duncan, Venkata Nadella, Ashley Clark, Stacey Giroux and John Graham

Public Finance Review, 2017, vol. 45, issue 5, 678-700

Abstract: A growing number of states are pursuing strategies to combat declining fuel tax revenue and fund road construction and maintenance, including the use of sales taxes, income taxes, and tolls; raising fuel tax rates; and adopting road mileage user fees. We use data from a nationally representative survey to compare public acceptability of a mileage user fee with each of these alternative revenue mechanisms. We find that support for the revenue options varies from 13.4 percent for income taxes to 33.8 percent for tolls, with higher gasoline tax rates, mileage user fees, and sales taxes in the middle. The evidence also points to stronger intensity of opposition than intensity of support across all alternatives. Finally, we find that, conditional on opposition to the mileage user fee, public acceptability is highest for tolls, followed by higher fuel taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes. Policy implications are discussed.

Keywords: road mileage user fee; gasoline tax; tolls; highway financing; public opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pfr.sagepub.com/content/45/5/678.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:45:y:2017:i:5:p:678-700

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Finance Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().