Foxx Asks State Leaders to Help Push Obama’s Highway Plan
WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx urged state transportation leaders Feb. 27 to help persuade Congress to pass President Obama’s plan to save the Highway Trust Fund and ramp up infrastructure investment across the country.
Obama is proposing a four-year, $302 billion transportation reauthorization bill funded in part by corporate tax reform.
“Essentially, the concept of the use of business taxes is you would create a one-time revenue stream that could be deployed in our case over a four-year period into infrastructure investment,” Foxx told a gathering here of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
“We would generate $150 billion additional dollars, $63 billion of which would replenish the Highway Trust Fund and about $90 billion of which would be used to do more in investment around the country,” he said.
Ten billion dollars would create a new freight grant program for rail, highway and port projects that address what the White House said was the need for “the efficient movement of goods across the country and abroad.”
Compared with MAP-21, the current two-year bill that was passed in 2012, “having a four-year funding source is a pretty big deal, so, we think that this is a proposal that makes good sense, particularly given that there’s similar discussions on the House side about business tax reform,” Foxx said.
House Ways and Means Chairman David Camp (R-Mich.) unveiled a plan Feb. 26 to overhaul the nation’s tax system that he said would generate $126.5 billion for the trust fund over eight years by repatriating corporate profits held overseas.
Foxx said the Obama administration’s plan is similar to Camp’s.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) also spoke at the annual AASHTO event, saying recent actions have made him optimistic that a better funding mechanism will be enacted.
“I think it’s very encouraging that the president and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee are both trying to figure out how to solve the trust fund situation,” Shuster told Transport Topics after his luncheon speech.
