Garden State gasoline tax is set to rise to pay interest for potholes filled years ago

Come January, the great state of New Jersey—the Garden State, a name now tinged with the sweet irony of petunias pushing up through cracked concrete—will kindly ask you to pay a little more for the privilege of moving across its storied landscape.

The price of a gallon of gasoline is set to rise, not by the whims of a foreign sheik or a Texas wildcatter, but by the solemn, deliberative hand of your own government.

On the first dawn of 2026, the tax on each gallon will climb by 4.2 cents, bringing the total levy to a majestic 49.1 cents. This places New Jersey in the rarefied air of the nation’s most taxed motorists, a dubious honor we seem to chase with the fervor of a prize bulldog chasing a meat wagon.

It seems the Transportation Trust Fund, that grand and intricate mechanism designed to pave our roads and shore up our bridges, has developed a most expensive cough.

The money you thought was buying gravel and girders is, in ever-greater measure, being converted into something far less tangible: interest. Pure, simple, costly interest.

The official word, delivered with the dry precision of a stone tablet, is that this revenue will “support the transportation trust fund.” A comforting phrase, suggesting potholes filled and rails made true. But the devil, as always, is not in the roadwork, but in the ledger.

The Trust Fund, you see, is less a piggy bank and more a master of ceremonies for a bewildering financial opera. It is an “independent agency,” a creature of statute, that finances our needs not with cash in hand, but with promises to pay later.

It borrows. It bonds. It pledges the very taxes we are now about to increase.

And what has this magnificent engine of borrowing built?

A mountain. A veritable Himalaya of debt. The figures presented with bureaucratic calm are enough to make a taxpayer’s hair curl tighter than a watch spring. The Authority currently has $20.5 billion in bonds outstanding.

But the real spectacle, the breathtaking finale of this long-running show, is the total “Debt Service Outstanding.” That is the principal plus all the interest we have promised to pay, from now until the final bond matures, which, for some, is a generation from now. That figure stands at $32.5 billion.

Let that number sink in.

For every dollar borrowed to lay pavement today, we have committed to pay back roughly $1.58 tomorrow. This is the arithmetic of a man who takes out a new loan to pay the interest on his old ones, all while insisting his financial foundation has never been stronger.

They will tell you this is necessary. They will speak of “capital programs” and “reauthorizations,” of “dedicated revenues” and “system rehabilitation.”

They will point to the $2 billion slated for projects in the coming year, a sum that sounds impressive until you hold it against the $2 billion we will pay this year alone just to service the existing debt.

It seems even less impressive when one notes that New Jersey needs to spend $3.5 billion each year to maintain its transportation system.

It is a treadmill of our own devising, powered by the fumes of our own tanks. We are not fueling our future; we are financing our past.

The website, in a masterpiece of modern legalistic candor, warns that the information “speaks only as of the date it was posted,” that “material developments may occur,” and that they “do not undertake to update.”

It is a metaphor in search of a poet: the caretakers of our infrastructure funding cannot guarantee the accuracy of their own statements from one day to the next.

The federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF), which is the primary funding mechanism for most U.S. surface transportation projects, is also projected to become insolvent by 2028.

They advise that nothing herein is an offer to sell bonds, which is a relief, for the bonds they have already sold appear to be a burden quite sufficient for three generations of Jerseyans.

So, as you pull up to the pump in the new year and watch the numbers spin with the frantic energy of a slot machine, consider what you are buying. A fraction of your payment will go to the road ahead.

A larger and more insistent fraction is being sent backward, to satisfy the ghosts of budgets past. We are not merely paying a tax.

We are paying the price for a government that long ago decided it was easier to mortgage tomorrow than to honestly budget for today. The asphalt may be fresh, but the path we’re on is worn thin indeed. And that, as they say, is the way it is.