The Antiplanner’s friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense alerted me to the latest earmark scandal, the earmark from nowhere. Apparently, the transportation bill approved by Congress in 2005 included an earmark to widen Interstate 75 in Florida.
But in the bill signed by the president, that earmark was mysteriously deleted and replaced by an earmark to add an interchange to I-75 at Coconut Road in Lee County. By an extraordinary coincidence, Representative Don Young, who chaired the House Transportation Committee, had just given a fundraising speech in Florida where he raised $40,000, much of it from developers who owned land adjacent to I-75 at Coconut Road.
Naturally, people are wondering how that earmark ended up replacing the one approved by Congress. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn argues that this is one more reason to ban earmarks — and both Senators McCain and Obama have signed onto Coburn’s amendment to investigate how the Coconut Road earmark was placed in the bill.
A few years ago, the issue was very tedious and order viagra australia had very less solution. How to know whether a pharmacy offers authentic Canadian drugs? Those buying medicines online must first ensure that they are dealing with a genuine Canadian pharmacy. prescription de viagra canada http://www.slovak-republic.org/history/national-oppression/ Both the generic ed pills viagra generico mastercard are used for the preparation of best herbal pills for men are clinically tested and approved by certain federation. If all has gone well you should now canada viagra generic have all three credit reports in hand. Planners cheer when earmarks go to build bike paths and rail transit lines, but they probably aren’t pleased to see earmarks going to boost the value of some developer’s land. What people need to understand is that big-government spending invites this kind of corruption. This earmark is not exceptional; all that is exceptional is that someone caught it and was able to publicize it.
Between 1956 and 1980, federal highway money was allocated to the states based on a strict formula, and the states could only spend it on highways. Congress gave the states a mission to build the Interstate Highway System, and it didn’t earmark any of the money because earmarking would threaten the mission. Decisions about how to spend the money were made strictly on engineering grounds.
After 1980, the Interstate Highway System was nearly complete, so Congress began to divert highway user fees to transit and other purposes. The mission got fuzzy, so Congress stepped in and began earmarking. There were fewer than a dozen earmarks in the 1982 transportation bill; the number steadily increased to more than 7,000 in the latest reauthorization bill.
In the short run, a ban on earmarks might do some good. But canny members of Congress will always find a way to get around such bans. In the long run, Congress should get out of the business of funding local transportation programs.
Agreed. I think you’ll get a lot of usual opposition to support the central idea of this article, AP.
P.S. I helped Senator Coburn’s campaign back in my OU days with the Oklahoma College Republicans.
Antiplanner,
I’ve had the opinion for a while that since the Interstate Highway system is basically completed, then we should repeal all (or nearly all) of the federal gasoline tax. The feds should either collect only 2-3 cents per gallon of gasoline in order to do simple maintenance of what already exists, or do away with it altogether. That would get rid of the problem of federal highway tax funds being raided for earmarks and for rail transit schemes.
The main issue that would remain is what to do about the Interstate freeway roads that are within the boundaries of major cities. I would say that the feds should turn them over to the states and let the states and locals deal with these problems since the traffic congestion is from locals using them. I agree with the idea that many (but by no means all) transportation issues are local issues and should be dealt with locally.
I would argue the interstate system is far from complete. There are many roads that need additional lanes/capicity, need to have interchanges modernized, bridges rebuilt, et al. But instead of putting money into that, it gets redirected elsewhere. An example of this is the interchange between I25 and US6 in Denver. It’s an old design for freeways that had much less traffic. There are some pesky on/off ramps for streets right next to the US6/I25 ramps. Traffics gone way up and it needs to be rebuilt with proper seperated enterance/exit lanes, etc. CDOT’s again delayed the project. Some of that is Colorado’s fault. But a big part of that is a lack of funding from the feds. Colorado Springs could use a bypass. There’s the old proposed I-37 between St. Louis and Minneapolis. The Great Plain states would like to see US85, the Can-Am highway, beefed up to better facilitate traffic based on trade with Canada and Mexico. I’d imagine there are cities in the east that could use some work done (well, as long as they promise never to do the Big Dig again). I suspect there’s plenty of work left for the interstate system. Not that I want to condone the taxes; I’m just saying in terms of that paradigm there’s still plenty of new projects out there.
As for the earmarks, the problem is they bypass the system of checks and balances. In this case freeway developers didn’t see the need to for the interchange. It wasn’t as high of a priority as other things. So the Senator pops in an earmark and gets it. Even if there wasn’t any shady business associated with it, it would still be wrong. It would be spending money when it was needed more elsewhere.