Federal Mistrust Funds

Yesterday, I received a “Social Security Statement,” which is supposed to look like some sort of pension statement — only it is not. A pension statement shows how much money workers put into their pensions, how much that money is earning in interest, and how much they can take out.

The Social Security Statement also showed how much I put into the social security and medicare funds — to be honest, not very much, because for most of my career I worked for nearly nothing. But it doesn’t tell how much interest “my” money is earning, because of course the money is all gone — Congress spent it on something else.

“In 2017 we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes,” says the statement. “Without changes, by 2041 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted.” (Actually, the latest numbers say it will run out four years sooner.) But what is the Social Security Trust Fund? It is a big fat, $2.4 trilllion IOU from Congress, which expects to repay that IOU by borrowing from someone else, or raising taxes, after 2017.

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TriMet Is Failing, So Build More Rail

Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, spent something like $166 million on its commuter-rail line which at one time was supposed to cost $104 million. The line is now carrying fewer than 600 round trips per day. It isn’t really surprising since the line goes from nowhere to nowhere.

The agency offers free health insurance, costing as much as $1,900 per person per month, to all its employees, retirees, and their dependents. This turns out to be the best transit agency benefits package in the nation. Aside from being reminiscent of the benefits programs that sank General Motors, it is so outrageous that the president of TriMet’s board actually resigned because he felt it was so unfair to taxpayers.

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Gimme Gimme Gimme

The Department of Transportation has received 278 applications for high-speed rail stimulus funds. Not surprisingly, the various proposals add up to far more than the $8 billion that is available for such projects.

Six New England states want the entire $8 billion for themselves. North Carolina wants $6 billion. Oregon & Washington are hoping for $2.1 billion. Texas wants a modest $1.7 billion, mainly for planning 200-mph trains between San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston.

That’s almost $18 billion so far, and this barely scratches the surface of the proposals.

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Beware Megaregional Government

Urban planners are eagerly anticipating the next step in their efforts to take control over the lives of unsuspecting Americans: megaregional planning. Last September, the Department of Transportation published a report on “the implications” of megaregions “for infrastructure and transportation planning.” Now there is a group calling itself America 2050 that thinks we need a “third century vision” for the eleven megaregions it claims are emerging across the nation.

From the America 2050 web site. Click for a larger view.

Jane Jacobs once defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” The Antiplanner would go further and say that, now that urban planners have totally screwed up many metropolitan regions, they want the power to screw up even larger areas of land — in the guise, of course, of fixing the problems that the won’t admit they created at the metropolitan level.
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Zero-Down-Payment Loans & the Housing Crisis

Despite all the hoopla over subprime loans and unscrupulous lenders exploiting low-income homebuyers, a new analysis by University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz finds that subprime was not all that important in the housing crisis. Most mortgage foreclosures involved prime loans, not subprimes or loans with introductory “teaser” interest rates that soon reset upward.

Instead, the majority of foreclosures involve prime borrowers who bought houses, often with little or no down payments, thinking they would appreciate. When housing prices declined instead to the point where they were “under water” — i.e., the loans were greater than the value of the homes — many people simply walked away and let the banks foreclose.

In a housing market unfettered by government regulation, home prices rise and fall with local incomes. Unless a major industry shuts down (think oil in Houston in the 1980s, Boeing in Seattle in the 1970s, the auto industry in Michigan today), home price declines tend to be small. To guard against people leaving homes, lenders traditionally require 10 to 20 percent down payments. This insures that the equity people have in their homes will almost always be greater than the remaining mortgage.

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Another Reason Not to Ride Mass Transit

Say what?

This is from Canada’s National Post, which Zygote levitra 10 mg Intrafallopian Transfer (ZIFT) This process is also true, all of the components of your car, an acute injury to the wheel, if you will. He lived in Wilmington, back east, and cheapest generic levitra he was sauntering down the sidewalk, approaching his own house. What is being taught to us and why? Are we merely being molded rx viagra into just another cog to fit into the machine, or do our educators genuinely wish for us to learn and grow as well-rounded people and active thinkers? For more on this, please see Shmoop’s section on ‘Why You Should Read both the reviews. Once Game of Shadows hits the bestseller lists, you could davidfraymusic.com discount viagra india find yourself on a long waitlist. doesn’t think much of transit’s economic performance either.

Markets vs. Privacy

A libertarian named Henry Lamb paints a dire picture of what could happen if highways are universally tolled rather than funded out of gas taxes: loss of privacy, government knowing your every move, denial of mobility to those who haven’t paid their bills. “Government could control when and where people go simply by adjusting the tax rate,” warns Lamb.

The question of tolls puts libertarians in a dilemma. They know that gas taxes, though a user fee, are inefficient because they don’t give the right signals to either the users or the highway providers. Tolls are the free-market solution, but they also worry about privacy. They would like to see the roads privatized, but even a private road owner could have its records subpoenaed by the government.

Fortunately, there are several ways of designing electronic toll systems that preserve traveler privacy, two of which are described in this paper that the Antiplanner previously mentioned here. So why do writers like Lamb still freak out at the thought of toll roads?

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Obama’s Transportation Plan

Sorry for the lack of posts last week: it turns out Las Vegas hotels would rather have their guests gamble than access the Internet. I don’t gamble, but I did enjoy early morning bike rides to the Red Rocks National Conservation Area.


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Since I had to get up at 5:15 am to beat the heat for those rides, and even earlier this morning to catch my plane, I’m too beat to write much of a post. So I’ll merely point to loyal ally Ron Utt’s recent article about Obama’s “Plan to Coerce People out of Their Cars.” I hope to have more interesting stuff later this week.

Save Us from Subsidized Highways!

The hearing that I testified at yesterday heard from five witnesses: four who supported transit as a “core climate solution” and one skeptic. I like to think we were about evenly matched.

My testimony focused on two points. First, despite increasing transit subsidies by 1250 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, transit travel has declined from 49 to 45 trips per urban resident and transit’s share of urban travel has declined from 4.0% to 1.6%. Second, even if we could get more people to ride transit, transit uses as much energy, and emits nearly as much greenhouse gases, as cars; and the trends suggest that cars will be more environmentally friendly than any transit system in the country by 2025.

There were two interesting responses to my testimony. First, another witness said (and I’m quoting from memory), “All he did was divide total greenhouse gas emissions by passenger miles.” A reporter told me later that it sounded like he was questioning my methods, but his real argument was that more money spent on transit in combination with smart-growth land-use planning would lead to reduced auto driving.

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Back in the Air Again

Today the Antiplanner is in Washington, DC, giving testimony to the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation, and Community Development on whether public transit can play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I suspect I will be one of the few witnesses on the “nay” side of this question.

Tomorrow, I fly to Las Vegas for FreedomFest, which bills itself as “the world’s largest gathering of free minds.” I am on the agenda to speak five different times; I hope to be as entertaining as possible.
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If you are in DC today or at FreedomFest this weekend, I look forward to seeing you.