SC Begins Nationwide Campaign to Improve Roads & Bridges

A nationwide campaign to fix crumbling roads and unsafe bridges kicked off in South Carolina Tuesday.

At a news conference in front of an asphalt manufacturing plant in Columbia, business leaders and South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, D-6th District, called on Congress to pass a new six-year federal transportation bill.

The campaign will include billboards, newspaper ads and online ads. The campaign also has a website, www.FixAgingRoads.org.

They say the fact that Congress has not renewed the Federal Highway and Transit bill is costing the state jobs. "Our communities can't thrive and our businesses can't grow if they're saddled with potholes and unsafe bridges," says Bruce Turmail, with the business groups Americans for Transportation Mobility and the Transportation Construction Coalition.

New data from the Associated General Contractors of America show that five percent of Columbia's construction workers lost their jobs between July 2009 and July 2010.

The question is how to pay for the improvements. Rep. Clyburn says he supports a transaction fee of 0.25 percent on stock transactions. He says there's no support in Congress to pay for the transportation improvements by raising the federal gas tax, which is now 18.3 cents per gallon.

“Taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, which is back to business as usual, even paying out exorbitant bonuses.  I believe it is time to have Wall Street pay back the taxpayers,” Congressman Clyburn said.  “We shouldn’t fund a transportation bill by asking people to pay more at the gas pump, so I am asking that Wall Street repay Main Street."

He says the transaction tax would hit Wall Street speculators and would be painless to average South Carolinians.

Economists estimate the new tax would raise about $100 billion annually, enough to pay for the transportation bill reauthorization and still have $50 billion to pay down the deficit, Clyburn says.

But when asked whether a tax on stock transactions would be passed along to everyone with a 401(k), he said the nation has been involved in two wars without ever paying for them.

"Putting all of that on credit cards. And so it seems to me that the time has come for all of us to make some form of sacrifice for these two wars that we have fought," he says.

Republicans in Congress have been holding up the transportation bill because they don't want to raise taxes or increase the deficit to pay for it.