Mitch Daniels and The Indiana Toll Road

Mitch Daniels and The Indiana Toll Road. Indiana Highways Given To Foreign Companies Bill HR 7 plans to parcel off and sell out entire sectors of America’s infrastructure to foreign companies. HR 7 would put tolls on all state roads in America. Currently tax payers pay for roads through the gasoline taxes. The Traitor Politicians want to divert the gasoline tax dollars to the transportation and highway Trust account at the IMF. YOUR gasoline tax is going to the IMF. An amendment to allow tolls on ALL existing interstates in all 50 states is expected to be presented on the floor by Senator Carper of Delaware.

Imposing tolls on existing freeways is a massive DOUBLE TAX — charging motorists an additional tax, a toll, to use what they’ve already built and paid for! They also are proposing taxing people by the mile they drive but, that is a side issue at this time.

The current House Bill, HR 7, only bans tolls on existing FEDERAL interstates. It GUTS the ban on imposing tolls on existing STATE highways — a ban that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison put in place for Texas since 2007. The fate our public freeway system is under attack!

Government and Indiana Gov Daniels has figured out that instead of solving congestion, they can manipulate it for a profit (by keeping your free lanes congested and forcing people to pay a premium to get mobility). They’re terrified to raise the gas tax, but have no problem imposing tolls on all new capacity to our roads, even on EXISTING lanes that we travel today without tolls.

It costs 1-2 cents per mile to travel a gas tax funded freeway, but anywhere from 20 cents a mile up to 75 cents per mile to use a toll lane. It’s an explosion in our cost to travel. A gas tax funded road costs PENNIES a day, a toll road costs DOLLARS a day and THOUSANDS more in new taxes per year.

The way toll roads are being financed today, ALL Americans are paying to build them through subsidies of taxpayer money like gas tax, but you won’t be able to use them without paying a toll, too (a DOUBLE TAX)! So whether you can afford to take these toll lanes or not, you’re paying for them. This notion that tolls are user fees is a myth when you look at how heavily they’re subsidized by ALL taxpayers. You’re also paying for them through a higher cost of goods that gets passed onto consumers.

Selling us out

Both the House and Senate versions of the federal highway bill, dubbed the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, include public private partnerships (or PPPs) that sell-off our public roads to private corporations in 50-99 year government-sanctioned toll road monopolies. PPPs use heaps of public money to socialize the losses, while they privatize and GUARANTEE profits for the private operators.

The TIFIA loan program is a HUGE source of funds used to subsidize ill-conceived toll roads that can’t pay for themselves. It’s the primary pot of taxpayer money given to these private, foreign corporations seeking to takeover our U.S. highways using public private partnership toll road contracts.

NOTE: The first TIFIA loan was awarded to a private consortium in a PPP deal on the South Bay Expressway in San Diego. It went bankrupt less than three years later due to traffic projections that were off by over 40,000 cars per day! Taxpayers had to accept a write-down of nearly $80 million of a $172 million federal TIFIA loan in yet another taxpayer bailout for private corporations.

The TIFIA loan program is all BORROWED money from the Federal Reserve, so who will have to bailout these toll roads when the cars don’t show up as they didn’t in San Diego along with other projects across the country? YOU and me, the taxpayer.

Think about it – PPPs give private corporations the power to TAX! They are granted the power to levy unlimited toll taxes on the traveling public – and we can’t hold corporations accountable like we can politicians at the ballot box. This is why politicians LOVE PPPs. They get to OUTSOURCE the taxation to their special interest buddies and makes us pay back our own money with interest through tolls!

Rather than get rid of the failed TIFIA loan program, the federal highway bill INCREASES TIFIA funding by nearly TEN times from $100/yr to $1 BILLION/yr. Current law requires the taxpayers to be paid back first, now in the bill as written, private interests would get paid back first and taxpayers would be paid back last.

PPPs also contain non-compete clauses that prohibit or penalize the expansion of free roads surrounding the privatized toll roads, guaranteeing congestion on the free routes.

Also, PPP toll contracts allow private entities to benefit from the use of eminent domain, and they result in toll rates as high as 75 cents a mile. That’s like adding $15 to every gallon of gas you buy!

Mitch Daniels and The Indiana Toll Road, officially the Indiana East–West Toll Road, is a toll road that runs for 157 miles (253 km) east–west across northern Indiana from the Illinois state line to the Ohio state line. It has been advertised as the “Main Street of the Midwest”.

It is owned by the Indiana Finance Authority and operated by the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company, a joint-venture between Spanish Cintra Concesiones de Infrastructures de Transporte and Australian Macquarie Atlas Roads.
Governor Mitch Daniels leased the toll road for 75 years to an Australian-Spanish consortium for an upfront payment of $3.8 billion. Part of the proceeds will fund a portion of the planned extension of I-69 through southwestern Indiana. Your Gasoline tax will go to the IMF. And no longer build roads as it was intended to do. Your tolls will build roads and your gasoline tax is robbed of you and sent to the IMF. Stolen to the bankers.

Interstate 80 interstate 90 was built with your gasoline tax, that’s why you pay a gasoline tax. Toll roads are corporate welfare and double taxation.

You Will Be Taxed Per Mile Driven