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‘A Good Graphic’ (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

A couple of weeks ago, I opined in this space that our Legislature should just raise the blankety-blank fuel tax to pay for the highway construction and maintenance that Arkansans need and want. Last week, I ranted about the use and misuse of data, including by “the media” (my favorite monolith).

This week, thanks to our friends on the editorial page at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I’m going to pull both of those topics together.

After my column on fuel taxes appeared, I was called everything but a commie pinko by those brave anonymous commenters on our website. I noticed that Paul Greenberg, the Democrat-Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist, also concluded that we need an actual tax, not Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s piecemeal “supposedly tax-free proposals.”

But, in a boldface reminder that Greenberg is no longer editor of the daily paper’s opinion page, the editorial that same day gave Hutchinson a big amen (“What the governor said” was the headline) and based its argument on the fact that Arkansas’ fuel tax is already higher than any neighboring state.

This is true and was reflected in an accompanying map showing the fuel excise taxes in Arkansas and surrounding states. “[I]f a photograph is worth a thousand words, a good graphic is worth at least a hundred,” the editorial said.

Our higher fuel taxes — higher by between 1.5 and 9.5 cents per gallon, depending on the product and the state being compared — are already discouraging interstate truckers from fueling up in Arkansas, the editorial assures us, and any increase would be the start of “a downward spiral. Or certainly could be.”

If I understand correctly — which is not, of course, the same as agreeing — the editorial’s point is Arkansas’ highways must be held hostage to the tax policy of six other states and the (presumed) behavior of truck drivers.

As it happens, the one and only data point that the Democrat-Gazette considered in coming to its bold conclusion that a higher fuel tax would pave the road to hell is not the only factor that might be considered. Here are some data points the D-G’s editorial didn’t consider:

♦ Arkansas is 33rd in population but 12th in miles of state-maintained highways. We simply have more highways per capita than most other states. Tennessee has 15 percent fewer miles of highway to maintain and more than twice as many taxpayers to spread the cost across. Oklahoma has 25 percent fewer miles and 30 percent more residents. Texas, well, it has almost five times as many miles of highway but more than nine times Arkansas’ population.

Missouri has about twice as many miles and twice as many people as Arkansas. But keep this in mind: Federal fuel taxes are distributed back to states under a formula that, in part, attempts to return dollars to the states in which they were collected. More fuel sold to more people in Texas and Tennessee and Missouri means more federal highway dollars headed for those states.

♦ Lower fuel taxes do not necessarily translate to lower fuel costs. Fuel prices bounce around pretty dramatically these days, so this may not be exactly correct on the day you read this column, but on the day after the D-G’s editorial appeared, the AAA reported that diesel prices at the pump were lower in Oklahoma, Mississippi and Texas than in Arkansas — but higher in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee. And the variation from the highest in the region to the lowest was 9.3 cents per gallon — less than 5 percent of the total price. Truckers headed from Oklahoma to Mississippi, as the D-G suggested, might not want to fuel up in Arkansas if they can help it. But there might be a reason West Memphis is truck-stop heaven for drivers continuing east on I-40 into Tennessee.

I started with diesel just because the D-G editorial seemed mainly concerned with getting truckers to fuel up in Arkansas, but the AAA prices for gasoline made Arkansas look even better. Of the six states that touch Arkansas, only Mississippi has a lower average price for regular gas — and then only by a penny, despite a gasoline tax that is 3.5 cents lower per gallon.

♦ The D-G’s graphic acknowledged that Arkansas’ taxes on gasoline (21.5 cents per gallon) and diesel (22.5 cents) are still lower than the national average (23 cents on gas and 24 cents on diesel). But neither the graphic nor the editorial looked beyond the contiguous states to note that many states have either raised their fuel taxes in the past year or are considering tax increases. Some have considered fuel tax increases and ultimately rejected them, leading to headlines like this from the Herald-Whig in Quincy, Illinois: “Missouri lawmakers fail to fix road-fund crisis.”

Arkansas lawmakers didn’t fix it either. They just kicked it on down the road.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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