Yesterday, the Senate passed a six-year transportation bill that increases spending on highways and transit but only provides three years of funding for that increase. As the Washington Post commented, “only by Washington’s low standards could anyone confuse the Senate’s plan with ‘good government.'”
Meanwhile, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy says the House will ignore the Senate bill in favor of its own five-month extension to the existing transportation law. Since the existing law expires at the end of this week, the two houses are playing a game of chicken to see which one will swerve course first and approve the other house’s bill.
As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, the source of the gridlock is Congress’ decision ten years ago to change the Highway Trust Fund from a pay-as-you-go system to one reliant on deficit spending. This led to three factions: one, mostly liberal Democrats, wants to end deficits by raising the gas tax; a second, mostly conservative Republicans, wants to end deficits by reducing spending; and the third, which includes people from both sides of the aisle, wants to keep spending without raising gas taxes.
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According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, these funding schemes will only be enough to last through 2018, after which Congress will have to find another $51 billion to keep the spending going for another three years. That shortfall alone is probably what killed the bill in the House, though it would be nice to think that House members were also wary of a 1,000-plus-page bill sprung on them at the last minute (scroll down to “SA 2266” or search for “DRIVE Act”).
Naturally, the Senate bill does nothing to fix any of the perverse incentives found in the current law, such as the fund that encourages transit agencies to choose the most expensive, rather than the most effective, transit solution in any corridor. Instead, it rewards transit agencies that have neglected their infrastructure by creating a new “state of good repair fund” to help restore that infrastructure, effectively telling the agencies that they can continue spending on new transit lines they can’t afford to maintain and Congress will bail them out.
These games won’t end until Congress does what is right rather than what is easy by returning to a true, pay-as-you-go system. While I agree with fiscal conservatives who think that the federal government doesn’t need to be involved in most transportation issues in the first place, as long as it is involved, the deficit spending is doing more harm than good by making state and local transportation agencies increasingly reliant on the federal government rather than on user fees. Opponents of the current system need to do more than support immediate devolution; they need to find a strategic path from the current system to one that is more responsive to transportation users.
Gridlock? Good government? I know the AP has stated he’s not an anarchist, but how can he believe gridlock is bad and government can be good is beyond me, especially since the root domain is for the Thoreau Institute, and of course Thoreau was a man who claimed the best government was no government. *scratches head*
Moving on…
Gridlock=the best thing outside of no government.
I fear the Antiplanner often softens his message to resonate with the conservative masses and to please Cato.
“I fear the Antiplanner often softens his message to resonate with the conservative masses and to please Cato.”
Perhaps. But he announced he was voting for Obama in 2008. Sometimes I just think he hasn’t read a single Austrian economist.
Wish he would read A History of Money and Banking in the United States and write a review.
Won’t be holding my breath.
The problem is that the Antiplanner believes in the political system. This misplaced faith informs his positions in other areas. The political system is the voting on the allocation of aggressive violence against others, nothing more or less. It is as illegitimate as a thuggish motorcycle gang holding county elections.
metrosucks wrote:
The problem is that the Antiplanner believes in the political system. This misplaced faith informs his positions in other areas. The political system is the voting on the allocation of aggressive violence against others, nothing more or less. It is as illegitimate as a thuggish motorcycle gang holding county elections.
As the late Winston Churchill (clearly a small “d” democrat, and a lifetime Conservative party politician in Great Britain) put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
@ C.P.Zilliacus
“As the late Winston Churchill (clearly a small “d” democrat, and a lifetime Conservative party politician in Great Britain) put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
I’ve got two problems with that traditional view. Firstly, which form of democracy are we talking about? Direct (Athenian-style) democracy? Representative democracy? If representative, how should such a representative body be chosen? First-past-the-post? Proportionately? Alternative vote? Nominated to the seat? In the UK, we seem to have, or have had, one of everything. Some forms of democracy work much better than others, and I would suggest that some of these forms are much worse than other kinds of government. The Swiss, in particular, use referendums to stop governments from pushing through unwanted and unneeded infrastructure, something we desperately need in the UK.
Secondly, Winston Churchill was an old-fashioned imperialist bully-boy. He washed his hands of the famine in Bengal, approved of using chemical weapons in Iraq (although they were never used), approved of Hitler and was a cheerleader for Mussolini. Not someone who I would pick to advise on morality. The British people gave their view on him in the 1945 election, and I think they sized him up nicely.
“The Swiss, in particular, use referendums to stop governments from pushing through unwanted and unneeded infrastructure, something we desperately need in the UK.”
Swiss-style democracy has been durable and seems to work quite well. And the country does have super-great infrastructure … which the citizens regularly vote to fund.
Switzerland also has a population of just eight million. Many forms of government are more easily sustained at a local level. One of the main problems with American government is trying to find commonality among 320 million culturally, ethnically, and geographically different people. Remember that America is the most populous of the three geographically largest countries.
Ultimately the only government that’s sustainable is a small government based on voluntary association. History has shown the long-term success rate of government to be virtually zero.
The idea that Gridlock is good has always been an proven load of poppycock. There were 40,000+ new laws enacted last year alone. Not even God can count how many new regulations were added or changed.
In this specific case, gridlock in the US Congress doesn’t mean that the Feds stop spending money on transportation. It means that the status quo remains. The status quo means 1/3 to 1/2 a TRILLION dollars in Federal Debt are added every generation for a system that does little more than redistribute dollars to locals for local projects.
Did they size him up nicely in 1951, too?
Ah yes, the age ol’ game of judging a historical figure by today’s values. And of course a nice fat dollup of this-politician-said-something-nice-about-a-now-dispicable-figure. What a charming li’l’ exercise.
What does it prove? An important part of any nation’s leader’s job is to be a strategist, not a saintly ideologue. Chastising them for that is little more than chastising them for doing their job.
And it’s not just their job. Where would the US be today had Billy Bob spilled US blood to “stop a genocide”? Where would Obama get the US today by using his Africa visit to call out Ethiopia for their facial elections or for Kagame to stand for war crimes? Where would be today had Nixon stood by ideology and instead further shunned China? What if Lincoln instead of being a practical man had instead insisted that no state could be in the Union if it allowed for slavery ( Maryland, Deleware, et al. )?
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have high expectations, that we shouldn’t fight for what is good. It’s just that when we look at people like Churchill, pointing out some cheek kissing of Mussolini or FDR’s alliance with Stalin – a vile, evil man that arguably is responsible for the deaths of 25+million soviet civilians – is some sort of trump card in evaluating them. today.
The idea that Gridlock is good has always been an proven load of poppycock. There were 40,000+ new laws enacted last year alone. Not even God can count how many new regulations were added or changed.
I disagree strongly. My definition of ‘gridlock’ tends to accord with divided government, as is in place in the US federal government right now. There is plenty of evidence that laws passed under divided government tend to be more durable (less likely to be overturned) than those passed under single-party rule. The logic being that these types of laws tend to be more thoroughly discussed and negotiated before passage.
This does not guarantee that they will result in good policy of course, and current federal transportation policies, including financial arrangements (leave it up to the federal government to screw up the concept of a ‘trust fund’), are an example of that. But it does make it less likely that a high volume of laws will be passed. This is in line with a “first, do no harm”philosophy of government that accords well with the US Constitution.
As for those 40,000 new laws, I assume that most of them were passed at the state and local level as the Federal Register is only about 75,000 pages long. That is more an indication of our federated and decentralized style of government than of the outcomes associated with political gridlock.