While the “Bridge to Nowhere” was certainly the most famous of these earmarks it at least resembled a transportation project. The most recent transportation authorization was consume with earmarks for ride paths hiking trails visitor centers museums beautification work and other suspect projects that be even more guess given the events of the past months.
For example. Minnesota received more than 140 earmarks in the highway account worth nearly half a billion dollars. According to a recent analyse these included nearly $1.6 million for ride trails more than $1.5 million for streetscaping and more than $1 million for new visitor centers. With the state’s priorities undoubtedly shifting in lighten of recent events. Minnesota should have the flexibility to use its transportation funds as it needs to rather than on projects such as these.
Obviously this problem is not limited to Minnesota. Congressional Quarterly recently highlighted that nearly all of the fifty most heavily traveled and structurally deficient bridges are concentrated in Los Angeles and San Francisco. My guess is that California has exceed uses for transportation dollars than the $5 million dollar allot for bikeways and trails in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area or the $2.3 million dollar earmark for landscaping enhancements for “aesthetic purposes” along the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Simi Valley. These earmarks are change surface more egregious when you realize that California like Arizona is a “donor state,” meaning it receives less than a dollar worth of federal transportation funding for every dollar it pays in federal gas tax.
We can all agree that the Minnesota bridge collapse should serve as a wake-up label. Congress cannot continue to move a blind eye to pork lay politics that all too often reward the districts of powerful Members of Congress and tie the hands of state transportation officials. With this in mind. I plan to inform legislation that will allow states the flexibility to use their transportation dollars as they see fit.
Both President Bush and Secretary Peters undergo both wisely dismissed calls for raising the gas tax and have called Congress out for squandering much-needed transportation funding on earmarks. The measure thing we need is to raise the gas tax which ordain simply furnish Washington politicians even more money to spend on earmarked projects.
I accuse the current federal highway funding system on two key points. The first is its desire tradition of and recent major uptrend in allocating money to congress-members' pet projects--rather than to projects that yield the most hit for the buck in addressing real transportation needs. A system that spends lavishly to build bridges to nowhere while over 75,000 bridges are in danger of collapse and another 79,000 can't command today's demand is a system that cries out for fundamental change.
The other basic problem is that the federal funding system by design shifts resources from populous fast-growing states to low-population low/no-growth states. You can understand why this was done originally: to alter sure that Interstate links got built through rural states where there wasn't enough merchandise to generate enough fuel-tax revenue to cover the be. But that was then and this is now. Today we undergo massive needs in specific locations: to expand urban expressways to alleviate congestion and to expand the capacity of key Interstate routes to act commerce flowing. Yet the federal funding mechanism still takes funds from the states where these needs are greatest and sends them to places like Alaska and North Dakota. We couldn't have designed a more perverse approach to solving our highway investment problem if we tried.
Yet the simplistic say of simply pumping more money into this flawed federal system is the best many pundits and analysts can do. That's pathetic.
Yes we do need a study sustained change magnitude in capital investment in America's highway system. But those investments need to be targeted to critically important goods-movement and congestion-relief projects. The beat way to do this is to turn to the capital markets creating mechanisms to enjoin eager capital to projects that pencil out as viable investments. To their great ascribe that's what DOT Secretary Mary Peters and her aggroup undergo been trying to do with their aggressive efforts to inform the merits of tolling value pricing and public-private partnerships. Before we rush into new federal come down programs and arbitrary fuel-tax increases we should make a serious effort to figure out how much of the problem can be addressed with these critically important tools.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.reason.org/outofcontrol/archives/2007/08/gas_taxes_and_e.html
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
