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$30 Trillion National Debt in 2022

By | | News commentary
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Few people other than debt watchdogs noticed when the national debt reached $29 trillion last month. The debt has been rising at more than a trillion dollars per year since 2017, so it is almost certain to reach $30 trillion sometime in 2022. The Office of Management and Budget actually predicted it would exceed $30 trillion by the end of 2021, but it didn’t quite make it.

Although the national debt has long been a subject for debate, it didn’t start growing rapidly except in wartime until the late 1970s. Why then? My theory is that the post-Watergate election brought so many liberal Democrats into Congress that they were able to strip fiscally conservative Southern Democrats of power, and the latter were no longer able to serve as guardians of the public purse.

Just for perspective, $29 trillion is more than $87,000 per resident. Although the latest numbers for other countries are hard to come by, it is likely that only Japan has a greater per capita national debt. Back in the 1960s, national debt per capita was about $1,500. I remember thinking, “I don’t have $1,500, but I could probably earn that if I had to in order to pay my share of the national debt.” Today, when 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an emergency expense of $400, I doubt many would be able to repay an $87,000 debt. Continue reading →

Finding Sleep in Dense Cities

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Here’s something Californians can look forward to as urban planners force higher densities on existing neighborhoods and urban areas: buses for sleeping. A company in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities in the world, is offering “bus sleeping tours” of the city, 51-mile trips aimed at allowing residents to get a little shut-eye.

Hong Kong, the city where it’s hard to sleep. Photo by Tomas Forac.

Hong Kong is one of the most sleep-deprived cities in the world, with 70 percent of residents saying they have trouble sleeping. Obstacles to sleep include light pollution, noise pollution, and the presence of so many attractive bars and restaurants within walking distance of everyone’s homes. That’s exactly what planners want for California cities, and anyone who objects is called a racist. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Can’t Spend Money Fast Enough

By | | Transportation
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You have to feel sorry for transit agencies. Congress gave them $69 billion COVID relief funds and $40 billion in the infrastructure bill on top of a $14 billion annual federal subsidy. But, due to labor shortages, agencies can’t find enough workers to drive around their nearly empty buses and trains.

The Washington Metrorail 7000-series cars don’t look much different from earlier series of cars. But, in addition to falling off the tracks a lot, they also come with the “feature” that they can’t be operated in tandem with earlier cars, whereas all earlier cars were compatible with one another. Another great example of your tax dollars at work. Photo by Swagging.

This threatens “the recovery of city life,” warns the Washington Post. Give me a break. Most workers aren’t going back to work in the cities and most of those who are don’t want to take transit. For some reason, though, reporters think that transit, unlike any private business, should be exempt from having to cut back service just because few people use it. Continue reading →

The New York Subway Was Never Private

By | | Transportation
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My friend Scott Beyer, who calls himself a market urbanist, has his heart in the right place but often has his facts wrong. He thinks he believes in free markets, but he loves transit so much that he can’t accept that, in a true free market, most transit would disappear.

New York City subway construction, entirely paid for by taxpayers, in 1901.

His latest article asks if America will “get private subways (again)?” The article makes it clear that he believes the New York City subways were built with private money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Continue reading →

Transit’s Fiscal Cliff

By | | Transportation
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Transit officials in the San Francisco Bay Area say that transit there faces a “fiscal cliff” because ridership is so slow to recover from the pandemic. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District is in particular distress, say officials, because pre-pandemic fares covered a much higher percentage–the article says two-thirds but in 2019 it was actually 72 percent–of its operating costs than most transit agencies, so a loss of patronage means a greater loss of revenues as a share of its budget.

Some transit riders wear masks, but many more aren’t riding transit. Photo by OC Transpo.

Of course, those officials don’t mention that, unlike bus agencies, BART spends more money on capital replacement each year than it does on operations. Since capital replacement is essential to keep the trains running, fares actually covered only 36 percent of its costs. Continue reading →

U.S. Road Conditions and Performance in 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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While Americans drove their cars only 84 percent as many miles in 2020 as in 2019, according to data recently published by the Federal Highway Administration, they drove semi-trucks 101 percent as many miles. These and other data are from the 2020 Highway Statistics, an annual compilation of data on the condition, use, and financial status of the nation’s highway network.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Unlike the annual National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration releases as a group of two dozen or so tables together each fall, the Federal Highway Administration releases Highway Statistics incrementally. To date, it has released most of the 2020 tables relating to the extent and performance of highways, but very few financial tables. This policy brief will review some of the non-financial tables that have been released. Continue reading →

Pandemic Increases Importance of Affordability

By | | Housing
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Americans who moved across state lines in 2021 ended up in urban areas whose median home costs were almost $36,000, or 7.4 percent, less than the urban areas they moved from, according to Zillow. This follows a trend that began in 2020, when interstate movers ended up in areas with $29,500 lower median prices.

Prior to 2020, affordability seemed to be less important an issue. In 2018, the median prices of destination urban areas were only 0.1 percent less than origin areas, and in none of the four years before 2020 were they more than 2.0 percent.

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Census Shows People Fleeing New York, California

By | | News commentary
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Large numbers of Americans migrated away from heavily urbanized states last year, but the nation’s overall population grew by only 0.1 percent, according to data released by the Census Bureau early this week. Not only was this was the lowest rate of population growth in the nation’s history, “17 states and the District of Columbia lost population,” said the bureau.

Some of those population losses were quite large. According to this Census Bureau table, between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York lost more than 319,000 people, or 1.6 percent of its residents. California lost nearly 262,000 people, or 0.7 percent of its residents. DC’s population dropped by 2.9 percent; Illinois’ by 0.9 percent; and Hawaii’s by 0.7 percent. Other states that lost population included Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The fastest-growing states were Idaho (2.9%), Utah (1.7%), Montana (1.7%), Arizona (1.4%), and South Carolina (1.2%). Numerically, the fastest-growing states were Texas (+310,000 residents), Florida (211,000), Arizona (98,000), North Carolina (94,000), and Georgia (74,000). (All these numbers are rounded off as they are only estimates.) Continue reading →

Goodbye, Cato

By | | Mission
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The Cato Institute fired me last week. After fourteen years during which I wrote four books, 38 papers, hundreds of articles, and spoke at scores of conferences, they unceremoniously dumped me at a zoom meeting like someone throwing out a wad of used tissue paper.

Their explanation was that they had reorganized their economics policy group and I no longer fit within the new organization. I hadn’t been a part of any policy group for my first eight years at Cato and fit just fine.

I should have been alerted early this year when I received a poor performance review on my previous year’s work for the first time since starting the job. The poor review had nothing to do with my actual performance and was solely because my supervisor disagreed with me on one point of housing policy. The disagreement went back to 2016, so I didn’t understand why he brought it up in the 2020 performance review. I’ll probably write about that disagreement in more detail here in the future. Continue reading →

Illinois High-Speed Rail Goes 55.7 MPH!

By | | Transportation
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This week, a mere twelve years after getting $1.4 billion in high-speed rail funds from the federal government, to which was added $500 million of Illinois taxpayer dollars, Amtrak and Illinois have finally increased the speeds on trains between Chicago and St. Louis. Where previously trains were limited to 79 miles per hour, now they can go 90 miles per hour in some places.

Illinois hopes to eventually operated Chicago-St. Louis trains with cars and locomotives like the ones shown here, but after a mere twelve years not enough have been delivered to make that possible.

This will “make rail travel competitive with driving,” claims one journalist. Actually, it still won’t even come close to being competitive with driving. Continue reading →