James Oberstar: “Mr. Chairman, the initial purpose of the highway trust fund when it was crafted in 1956 was to finance the national…”

“Mr. Chairman, the initial purpose of the highway trust fund when it was crafted in 1956 was to finance the national system of interstate and defense highways, the world's largest infrastructure project and one of the marvels of engineering of the world, and was based upon the idea that we needed a dedicated revenue stream to finance projects that would take a long time to design, engineer, acquire right-of-way for the roadway to be built upon, and then to construct that roadway. So the framers of the Interstate Highway System Program conceived a dedicated revenue stream to be financed by a tax upon the users of the system, all those people who drive cars and trucks, and a tax upon fuel was agreed upon. It was also agreed in that initial legislation that this fund should be held in trust for the purpose for which it was intended, and that it should be deficit-proof, as the chairman of the committee has already expressed. It has been an enormously successful program. We have spent $120 billion on the Interstate Highway Program. It represents 1 percent of the Nation's highway mileage. It carries 26 percent of the Nation's highway traffic. That represented last year 990 billion miles traveled on just the Interstate Highway System alone.”