Tom McClintock represents the people of California’s historic gold country and Sierra Nevada in a district that stretches from Lake Tahoe, through Yosemite Valley and on to Kings Canyon.
Often described as “the gold standard” for fiscal conservatism in Congress, the National Taxpayers Union rated him the best vote for taxpayers in the House four times, most recently in 2020. Citizens Against Government Waste recently named him as one of only two perfect votes in the House fighting wasteful government spending.
We once enjoyed the finest highway system in the world, built around the automobile, which offers efficient, economical, convenient, comfortable, adaptive, doorstep-to-doorstep, 24-hour per day on-call service. We financed this remarkably simple system through fees, taxes and bonds paid for by highway users in proportion to their use. But beginning in the 1970’s, we abandoned all these advantages for rigid, inefficient, inconvenient, bureaucratized mass transit systems. We diverted highway taxes for purposes unrelated to our highways and squandered billions of dollars on government transit. The result is crumbling and chronically congested highways and breathtakingly expensive mass transit systems that the masses don’t use.
I believe that we need to restore our highway taxes for our highways, and undertake the long-overdue modernization of our once vaunted highway system.