Governor Rick Perry is responding to a proposal in Washington to raise the federal gax tax by sixty cents per gallon over five years, to pay for the rising cost of infrastructure. Here's a snippet:

Their recommendations prove the notion that the further someone gets from the actual location of a challenge, the less they know about it or how to solve it. Raising taxes is a surefire way to stifle growth, and limiting states’ freedom to innovate will only make it worse. The federal commission further shows a weak grasp of economic theory by encouraging states to not only accept their proposed massive federal tax increases, but to follow suit and simultaneously raise our own gas taxes at an even higher rate!

Texas already sends a hefty share of gas tax dollars to Washington and we get less in return than we should. Among U.S. states, Texas is the second largest donor to the federal Highway Trust Fund and ranks 50th in rate-of-return for our federal gas tax dollar. For every dollar we send to Washington, only 8 cents in federal transit program funds and 70 cents in federal highway program funds make it back to Texas.

It’s tough to get comfortable with sending even more of Texans’ hard-earned dollars to Washington, D.C., knowing they’ll only be earmarked, redistributed to other states and locked into programs that won’t do much to relieve crowding on our roads. This is big government at its worst.

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