I don't think anyone here is under the impression that government subsidies don't come from taxes. The criticism above is that subsidies skew the observed relative prices of transport at the point of use.

If I am reading https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/F... correctly (and I'm almost certainly not) the budget in 2023 was $60 billion (which to be fair includes more than just highways) and if this is correct (which it may be biased) https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t... then federal fuel taxes raised $43 billion of that.

It's within 2/3rds (and frankly lower than I thought, $60 billion doesn't get you @#@^ these days).

Yes, but I think the poster's point was that their locality maintained the roads using tax dollars collected from the locality - i.e. their local roads are sustainable system.

All US dollars are created by the US government, the ability of the US government to create valuable dollars comes from the tax base, so of course everything eventually goes back to taxes.

But it's not really relevant to the point.