Use a gas price ladder.

Like a pair of murderous thieves the Governornator seems stuck in the same financial meltdown of the Bush Administration. His proposal slash and burn everything could use a little forethought; the thinking he left out when he created this morass with the vehicle registration fee cut on becoming governor. Imagine responding to an emergency with laid off and minimum waged workers?

Rather than cut all all transport spending look at the benefits derived from high gas prices. Less driving means less needs for roads. Take that portion of the transport budget out completely. Add clean air and traffic calming fees to gasoline large enough to continue raising the price to offset the budget deficit. Take the resulting revenue and use it to meet the demand for transit and a walkable infrastructure.

Higher gas prices have reduced congestion, decreasing the needs for new roads, and meeting many government goals on higher transit usage, more carpooling, reduced air pollution, lower highway fatalities, ag land conservaton, wildfire awareness, and reduced gas usage. All these goals cost a lot in lives and money to implement and the later goal has major national security implications. The reduced need for roads means less spending on one of the larger program in the federal budget that has major negative ramifications for the environment with expensive mitigation in wetland, ag land protection, wildfires, water conservation, and wildlife protection.

Instead of expanding all the benefits of reduced driving from higher gas prices government is bemoaning the loss of revenue for their pork projects. This is because road building has become ingrained as the economic spur for local development based on timber, water, and land exploitation. The resulting rise in land prices drives out farmers and local business who can't compete without labor that can afford to live locally. Our lifestyle is exported to China for cheap trinkets at the local Walmart dragged in by GATT, an undemocratic organization.

The government should see that higher gas prices takes away the need for congestion management agencies and metropolitan transportation authorities. We should be talking like this so that policy makers can make the right choices. We should be doing more than just filling up the coffers in Riyadh and Tehran. We should use a ladder that increments the price of gas every year to a set goal of $16/- by 2012 to meet all our GHG requirements. If gas simultaneously rises in price on the world market the gas ladder should step down to keep the average increase per month as the same price. Not keeping gas at high levels will let motorists savings go up in fumes.

This way the government will get the money to realize its goals and meet national security goals.