OCR Text |
Show Who Should Pay For Highways? Asserting that highway development develop-ment and use has grown to such an extent In America that these highways have in fact become a public utility, Charles B. Steward, secretary of the Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation, declares that those who use the highways should pay for them. Mr. Steward analyses highway development and supports his conclusions in one of the featured articles in the October Octo-ber issue of "Review of Reviews and World's Work," a magazine of national circulation devoted to the discussion of current public questions. ques-tions. Aniaal expenditures for highways high-ways have reach'.d the stupendous s..m of two billions of dollars, declares de-clares Mr. Sts-nrc: expanding to this figure in but eight years The official expenditures as shown by government reports were less than $100,000,000 in 1923. In the eight year period the annual expense expanded more than twenty-fold. For the eight years the total expenditure ex-penditure reached the tremendous figure of almost $12,000,000,000. All of this sum must be paid by taxation tax-ation in one form or another, the writer asserts, and in the past eight years oniy jo w per cent of it has been paid by the users in the form of gasoline and license taxes while property owners own-ers and incometax payers have had to pay 63 1-2 per cent. Mr. Steward's discussion is from the viewpoint of the farmer, who, he declares, has already contributed contrib-uted substantially toward the cost of highway construction and is now continuing to contribute toward to-ward maintenance, the amount of such payments having no relationship relation-ship to the farmers' use of facility. facil-ity. Proper allocation of these costs would place the expense on the user of the highway and relieve re-lieve the property owner of unfair taxes he has to pay for them. |