http://www.frontiergroup.org/reports...pay-themselves
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Highway advocates often claim that roads ?pay for themselves,? with gasoline taxes and other charges to motorists covering ? or nearly covering ? the full cost of highway construction and maintenance.
They are wrong.
Highways do not ? and, except for brief periods in our nation?s history ? never have paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label ?user fees.? Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent.
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Federal gas taxes have typically not been devoted exclusively to highways ? The federal gas tax began its life as a deficit-fighting measure under President Herbert Hoover decades before the Interstate Highway System. Only during a brief 17-year period beginning in 1956 did Congress temporarily dedicate gas tax revenues to construct the Interstate network, a project completed in the 1990s. Since 1973, the gasoline tax has been used to fund a variety of important transportation priorities and has periodically been used to reduce the federal deficit.
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Since 1947, the amount of money spent on highways, roads and streets has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes and other so-called ?user fees? by $600 billion (2005 dollars), representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.
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So, since the taxes raised by gasoline taxes do not cover the cost of the roads I would have to assume that the money I pay in other taxes goes to covering the shortage.
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