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Notes -
It's not about what the revenues are used for. It's about internalizing the externalities. When you use roads, that imposes a certain cost on society, because it costs money to build and maintain the roads, and only so many people can use them at the same time. When you burn fuel, you impose a certain cost on society by contributing to global warming, and also emitting other pollutants.
US gas taxes might be high enough to cover one of these, but are probably not high enough to cover both of them. So maybe burning a gallon of gas has a total social cost (including the cost of extracting the gas, road upkeep, and pollution) of $3.50, but you only have to pay $2.75. Or whatever. This means that if you get $3 of value out of burning a gallon of gas, you'll do it, even though it does $3.50 worth of damage. That's a bad outcome. We want an incentive structure in which you only do $3.50 of damage if you get at least $3.50 in value from it.
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