Highway Trust Fund Critical to Maintaining Competitive Edge, Says Wyden at Hearing
The Highway Trust Fund requires $100 billion to maintain solvency over the next years, the timeframe needed to allocate infrastructure responsibility to states, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., at an May 6 committee hearing on the fund. The fund is critical to improving American roads, bridges and other infrastructure, to stay commercially competitive with foreign nations, said Wyden. “By any calculus, our investments in infrastructure lag way behind our competitors’. China, for example, invests 8.5 percent of its GDP in infrastructure, and in some parts of Canada, they’re investing 10 percent,” said Wyden (here). “The U.S. invests only 1.7 percent. No American can be happy with the prospect that it’s easier to move goods from a Chinese factory to a Chinese port than from an American factory to an American port. That’s what’s at risk.”
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The Department of Transportation says the fund will hit insolvency in August 2014 (here). Committee ranking member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah., said the program is worthwhile, although he dismissed suggestions of raising corporate taxes to pay for the funding. “I am more than willing to have a discussion about long-term financing options such as bond proposals and public-private partnerships,” said Hatch (here). “But we must remember that, in this committee, we are dealing with a funding problem more than a financing problem.”