Gas prices climb to all new high. No end in sight.

Seattle WA

Description

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said he would not support a temporary suspension of the state gas tax, despite President Joe Biden calling on state leaders to do so. On Wednesday, Biden called on Congress to suspend the federal $0.18 gasoline tax for three months — an election-year move meant to ease financial pressures at the pump that was greeted with doubts by many lawmakers. In Washington state, at $0.49 cents a gallon, the state's gas tax is only second to California as the highest in the country. "The oil companies would be the ones to benefit from suspending the gas tax," Inslee’s Executive Director of Communications, Jaime Smith, told FOX13 in a statement. "It provides another opportunity for them to pocket more profit at the expense of our ability to put people to work fixing our roads and bridges." By law, the gas tax has to be used for transportation-related projects like maintaining and building new roads and bridges. The state collects, on average, $144 million a month from the tax. "To me, it’s not worth it," says Democratic State Senator and Chairman of the power of Senate Transportation Committee Mark Liias. "Now we are going to keep looking at it - keep our minds open- but right now, we've got too many important projects underway," But the ranking Republican on the same committee, Sen. Curtis King, says the state is sitting on billions of dollars of surplus revenue that could be used to backfill money lost to a gas tax suspension. "That money hasn’t been invested in any way shape or form," he says. "But they [Democrats] don't want to give it to transportation because the environmentalists want six dollars a gallon gas and they want to force everybody out of their car."