Howard Gleckman for the Tax Policy Center: Let’s see if I have this right: Congress needs to finance highway and transit projects but can’t agree on how. The traditional revenue source is the gasoline tax. Gas prices are at their lowest levels in years and dropping. Consumers would barely notice if they had to pay a bit more now at the pump. And it might eventually mean less time sitting in traffic.
So will Congress take a perfect opportunity to raise the gas tax and fund these projects? Probably not. But if it doesn’t, it will fumble one of those rare opportunities when the economic and policy stars align almost perfectly.
There is little doubt Congress needs to do something. A few Republicans would scrap the federal system entirely and turn infrastructure over to the states (though they’d still have to pay somehow). But most in Congress want the feds to finance those roads and bridges. They just don’t want to pay for them.
This has been going on for years. As a result, the Highway Trust Fund is, not to put too fine a point on it, broke. In August, CBO estimated that between now and 2024 outlays will exceed revenues by $157 billion. Congress has not increased the gas tax since 1997. And, at the moment, lawmakers are keeping the trust fund going by resorting to gimmicks such as cutting employer contributions to their workers’ pensions (don’t even ask). Their temporary patch is due to last only until May.
BIG BEER VS. BIG CONTAINERS
Eric Boehm for the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal: In Florida, you can buy beer that comes in cans. You can buy beer that comes in bottles.
You can even buy beer that comes in kegs, in cases, in six-packs and in fancy bottles with cork-stoppers. You can buy beer that is poured from a tap at a bar.
But if you buy beer in a 64-ounce reusable container known by beer connoisseurs as a “growler,” you would be breaking state law.
You can buy a 32-ounce beer jug or a larger growler, but the most popular size — the 64-ounce bottle — is off limits.
Yes, it makes no sense. And that’s why Florida’s odd and illogical ban on 64-ounce containers of beer is being challenged in court by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm that loves taking on the nanny state.
“What’s the health or safety rationale for telling consumers that a half-gallon jug is off-limits, but two quarter-gallon jugs are fine? Clearly, the ban isn’t to help the public,” said Mark Miller, an attorney for PLF.
Growlers are legal in 47 other states (Idaho and Mississippi also ban them), and they have become the industry standard for many small craft breweries. Making them illegal in Florida, Miller said, is meant to protect major brewers who are afraid of losing market share to the craft guys.
LIGHTING UP CONTROVERSY IN MASSACHUSETTS
Sam P.K. Collins for ThinkProgress: A showdown in a town of less than 8,000 people has the makings of a modern-day David vs. Goliath story.
This week, health officials and residents in Westminster, a small town in northern Massachusetts, will have a chance to weigh in about a bill that, if enacted, will issue the first ban on the sale of tobacco products — including cigarettes, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes — in the country.
Massachusetts has already banned the use of tobacco in work places, and more than 100 communities in the state have prohibited smoking in public spaces. Proponents of the latest proposal cite increases in the sale of bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and dissolvable smokeless tobacco as a threat to the youngest residents’ health, especially since smoking prematurely kills 5.6 million adolescent smokers across the country.
“The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people,” Elizabeth Swedberg, health agent in Westminster, Mass., told the Associated Press. “The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this.”
While rates of smoking have declined among American adults in recent years, some people say that R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard — the second- and third-largest tobacco companies in the nation, respectively — will most likely continue a decades-old business model that thrives on the support of young people, also known as “replacement smokers.”
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from think tank research.
