Photos: Raritan Township road crew fixing potholes, April 22, 2014

A good poll question: Do you want potholes filled or left open until you lose a tire?

(Star-Ledger File Photo)

Imagine one day your home phone rings. You pick it up and there’s a pollster on the line.

“I’m holding a cute little puppy on my lap,” he says. “Should I: A) beat it, or B) pet it?”

How many people do you think would choose A? I’d say about as many as responded positively to the question asked in a recent online poll by a TV station: “Do you support raising the gas tax?”

The percentage of people wanting to pet that puppy turned out to be 86 percent. Only 14 percent thought it deserved a beating.

Keep that in mind as you follow the coverage of the effort to raise New Jersey’s gas tax. Poll after poll shows that voters don’t want to see the gas tax raised – or in other words that they want something for nothing.

Asking people whether they'd like to pay more for gas is like asking them whether you should beat a puppy or pet it. You have to face them with a real choice

The something in question is roads. If you want to drive on them, then you have to pay for them. And New Jerseyans haven’t been doing that for more than 20 years.

When the Transportation Trust Fund was set up in the 1980s during the Kean administration, a 10-year limit was put on the bonds. The gas tax was at its current level, 14.5 cents per gallon. Adjusted for inflation, that equals 31 cents today.

But instead of raising the tax to fund new construction, succeeding governors decided to blow out the bonds to their current term, which is 31 years.

Or in other words, a bunch of politicians were asked whether they wanted to pet some puppies. They did what you’d expect. They borrowed the money and passed the bill on to future taxpayers, some of whom weren’t even born yet.

As a result, all of the current gas tax revenue goes to pay off bonds. We now face a tough choice. We either have to borrow even more money, despite the fact that Wall Street has already downgraded our bonds because of past borrowing. Or we need to raise the gas tax.

To poll on this honestly, you’d have to give the respondent a choice that amounts to, “I’m holding in my lap a cute little puppy and a cute little kitten. I’m going to pet one and beat the other. Which one should I beat?”

A Rutgers Eagleton Poll in April addressed that question - even though you'd never know it from the media coverage. The headlines were along the lines of this: "Two-Thirds of New Jerseyans Oppose Gas-Tax Hike."

Which they did. But when asked whether road construction should be funded through either a gas-tax hike or through more borrowing, the results were a statistical dead heat, 40-39 in favor of borrowing.

Breaking that down even further brings us to the liberal/conservative split on the issue. When forced to choose between borrowing and taxing, Democrats preferred borrowing by a 47-35 margin. Republicans split almost equally on it, 39-38 in favor of borrowing.

From a conservative perspective, that number should be zero for Republicans. We conservatives believe pay-as-you-go beats borrow-and-spend every time. If you want roads built then you should pay for them - now.

The leading conservative voice in the Assembly, Republican Mike Carroll of Morris County, offers a proposal that would force politicians to face that choice.

Carroll has drafted a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state from any more bonding for transportation. Under his plan, any hike in the gas tax would have to be constitutionally dedicated to transportation. That’s all the state could spend, not a penny more.

“If the dedication wouldn’t cover it, then you can’t bond for it,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll be 5, 10 or 15 years down the line and we’ll be doing this all over again.”

We will indeed. Democrat or Republican, every governor wants to spend today and send the bill to taxpayers tomorrow.

“The Florio, Whitman, McGreevey and Corzine administrations have imposed a tax on us,” Carroll said. “We are paying a tax now imposed on people who didn’t vote for it.”

The good news is that voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2008 requiring that future bonding go on the ballot. That means the pols can’t sell more bonds without holding a real poll, the kind with teeth in it.

So the choice is simple. Borrowing is not an option. We either raise the gas tax or we stop building and maintaining roads.

That should be fine with Gov. Chris Christie. Back in 2009 when he was first running for governor, his position on the Transportation Trust Fund was “We should pay as you go with current funds.”

We should indeed. There are no puppies to pet. There are simply choices to be made.

And that’s what politicians are elected to do – no matter what the polls say.

ADD: I put in a call to Gov. Tom Kean before filing the column but he was out of state. When I got him on the phone, Kean confirmed that the original idea behind the Transportation Trust Fund was that it would be replenished every 10 years. If the politicians then thought more money was needed for transportation they would have to raise the gas tax and take the consequences from the voters - which would be few, by the way. People understand that good roads are worth paying for and the gas tax is the best way to do it.

But the moment Kean left office, the next governor started messing with the fiscal soundness of the fund. Here's an excerpt from a 1990 Star-Ledger article on that:

Articles from back then also state that this and other stunts caused Wall Street to question New Jersey's solid-gold AAA bond rating. Kean told me how he had considered that rating to be sacrosanct.

"I always thought the governor who lost that Triple-A bond rating would be in deep trouble," Kean said.

But when it was lost, nothing happened. We're now all the way down to A- status. because of out-of-control borrowing by Kean's successors. That status means we pay higher interest on our bonds, losing tens of millions a year in the process.

All that is lost on the typical poll respondent. But it's not lost on Wall Street analysts.

ALSO, I discussed the nature of polling with Pat Murray of the Monmouth Polling Institute, who was the only pollster to call the recent Booker-Bell Senate race right on the button. Murray pointed out that it's difficult to get accurate data on an issue like the gas tax because there is so much the public fails to understand about it.

"When public information and knowledge is high, it really doesn’t matter how you ask the question," said Murray. "But when information levels are low, the way you ask the question has a lot to do with the answers you get in a poll."

Murray said support will vary depending on how you frame the question.

"Do people really think our bridges and roads are about to fall apart?" he asked. "That’s part of their support or lack of support for a hike. When you inform them the roads are crumbling then you get support for the gas tax."

And when you then inform them that further borrowing is not an option, there are no choices left.

COMMENTS: Before commenting, please go to this page that describes the current finances of the Transportation Trust Fund. As you will see, the annual outflow for debt service is $1,124.6 million. That's equal to the current level for annual revenue.

What that means is that New Jersey will be unable to do road construction or repair in the near future because all of the revenue will be going to pay off debt. Note also the bond rating, which is A- for Fitch and Standard and Poor's. As stated above, it was AAA when the fund was started under Kean.

Do you propose getting that revenue by cutting elsewhere in the budget? Then go to this page and read the budget. Find the line items you would like to cut. But keep in mind that next year's budget is already about $5 billion in the red even before it's drawn up. So the first $5 billion in cuts will go to simply balancing it.

Get out the calculators! Good luck!

AND, note the letter to the editor linked below in which the writer shows he has no understanding whatsoever of the crisis. He claims gas-tax money was diverted from the trust fund to the general fund. This is nonsense. In fact gas tax money is not even sufficient to pay half the cost of the fund. Money goes the other way, from the general fund into the the transportation fund. The reader should have done his research before writing.