President Trump reportedly told lawmakers in a meeting in the White House that he supports a 25-cent increase in the federal tax on gasoline at the pump in order to support his program to invest in new and repaired roads and bridges.
The tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel. The tax , which supports the Federal Highway Trust fund, was last raised in 1993 and isn’t indexed to inflation. The fund has been suffering from losses in revenue because of improving auto fuel efficiency and has been at risk of becoming insolvent without repeated emergency Congressional funding.
“Sen. Tom Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, was in the meeting and confirmed in a statement that the president backed a 25-cent increase. “’President Trump came back to the idea of a 25 cent increase several times throughout the meeting,’ Carper said in a statement.
