Pork Politics
Last night I received a press release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee entitled “Lincoln Votes to Protect Millions in Taxpayer Funds for Little-Used Pennsylvania Airport.” Lincoln would be Arkansas Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln. According to the NRSC press release:
In a remarkable vote on the Senate floor this afternoon, U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) made clear that despite rising federal deficits and a record national debt, she still stands firmly on the side of more wasteful Washington spending. Lincoln today helped defeat an amendment, offered by U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), to the annual transportation appropriations bill that would end taxpayer subsidies for the John Murtha Airport, a little used 650-acre facility in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that has received at least $200 million in taxpayer funding. U.S. Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), who the airport was named after and who has been the subject of a number of ethics-related stories in recent months, has personally directed $150 million in federal funds to the facility even though it only has 3 flights daily to one destination: Washington, D.C.
When I went to the NRSC’s website I noticed similar press releases for other Democrat senators who I’m assuming are on the outfit’s election hit-list. Having never received an NRSC press release before, I’m assuming I received this one because I ripped Senator Lincoln in a blog post last week. If that’s the case, I’m impressed with the NRSC’s resourcefulness. Regardless, it made me curious to find out if any Republican senators voted with Lincoln and the other Democrats.
In fact, yes, two Republicans did vote to keep the federal money flowing to Murtha’s airport: George Voinovich of Ohio and Christopher “Kit” Bond of Missouri. Both are members of the third party in Congress: Appropriators. Given that he is the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, it’s not a surprise that Bond voted against an amendment unfriendly to a larded-up transportation appropriations bill. Both are retiring at the end of their terms in 2010, so the NRSC apparently wasn’t too worried about charges of hypocrisy.
With the exception of the aforementioned, all Republican senators voted for the amendment, including appropriators like Murkowski, Collins, Cochran, and Bennett. None of those folks are exactly known as fiscal tightwads. So what gives? Will these senators be headlining tea parties in the near future?
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Government Pays $4 Million for a Bike Rack
The $4 million Union Station Bike Transit Center is scheduled to open in Washington, DC on October 2nd. According to an August Washington Post story, 80 percent of the cost of this opulent bike center is being borne by federal taxpayers via the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Look, I harbor no animosity against bike riders, but under what authority — legal or moral — does the federal government tax me in order to build bike centers for parochial, special interests? The Constitution?
But let’s pretend — and I mean pretend – that such federal expenditures are legitimate. The Post article say the center will have 150 indoor bike racks and 20 outdoors. A recent NPR article says it will hold 130 bikes. Whatever the figure, at a cost of $4 million, it comes out to around $25-$30 thousand per bike. And, yes, I recognize that the “1,700-square-foot building west of the station will also have changing rooms, personal lockers, a bike repair shop and a retail store that will sell drinks and bike accessories.” But the ultimate purpose is to hold bikes. In my mind, the extra extravagance merely reflects the fact that taxpayers are picking up the tab.
There’s the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, it’s more like 4 million:
There you go, America. Your taxes are funding this multi-million dollar bike rack in Washington, DC — the beneficiaries of which will probably be the same Capitol Hill lobbyists and congressional staffers who spend all day pilfering your paychecks.
Tuesday Links
- After last weekend’s 9/12 March, you’d have to be deaf not to recognize that small-government conservatism remains a vital part of the national conversation. That, or you watch too much MSNBC.
- Nothing is simple when dealing with the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But here are a few ways the U.S. can engage the nuclear armed nation.
- Questions that must be answered before we proceed deeper into Afghanistan.
- Why it’s time to abolish the Department of Transportation, and devolve federal transportation programs to the states.
- Podcast: New police suit records every move an officer makes while on the job. Radley Balko weighs in.
High-Speed Fail
In a four-part series on the New York Times Economix blog, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser scrutinized high-speed rail and concluded that the benefits are overwhelmed by the costs. After making generous assumptions regarding the costs, user benefits, environmental benefits, and effects on urban development, Glaeser concludes that all the benefits of high-speed rail would still be less than half the costs.
As Washington Post writer Robert Samuelson observes, the Obama administration’s vision of high-speed rail is “a mirage. The costs of high-speed rail would be huge, and the public benefits meager.” Yet even Samuelson falls victim to the common assumption that high-speed rail “works in Europe and Asia” because population densities in those places are higher than in the United States.
The truth is that high-speed rail doesn’t work in Europe or Asia either. Japan and France have both spent about as much on high-speed rail as they have on their intercity freeway systems, yet the average residents of those countries travel by car 10 to 20 times as much as they travel by high-speed rail. They also fly domestically more than they take high-speed rail. While the highways and airlines pay for themselves out of gas taxes and other user fees, high-speed rail is heavily subsidized and serves only a tiny urban elite.
Making Airline Travel as Unpleasant as Possible
The Transportation Safety Administration long has made air travel as unpleasant as possible without obvious regard to the impact on safety. Thankfully, the TSA recently dropped the inane procedure of asking to see your boarding pass as you passed through the checkpoint — a few feet away from where you entered the security line, at which point you had shown both your boarding pass and ID.
However, there are proposals afoot in Congress to set new carry-on luggage restrictions, to be enforced by the TSA, even though they would do nothing to enhance security. An inch either way on the heighth or width of a bag wouldn’t help any terrorists intent on taking over an airplane. But the proposed restrictions would inconvenience travelers and allow the airlines to fob off on government what should be their own responsibility for setting luggage standards.
TSA also has restarted ad hoc inspections of boarding passengers. At least flights as well as passengers are targeted randomly. After 9/11 the TSA conducted secondary inspections for every flight. The process suggested that the initial inspections were unreliable, delayed passengers, and led experienced flyers to game the process. It was critical to try to hit the front of the line while the inspectors were busy bothering someone else. There was no full-proof system, but I learned that being first or second in line was particularly dangerous.
Finally TSA dropped the practice. And, as far as I am aware, no planes were hijacked or terrorist acts committed as a result. But TSA recently restarted the inspections, though on a random basis.
I had to remember my old lessons last week, when I ran into the routine on my return home from a trip during which I addressed students about liberty. Luckily I was able to get on board, rather than get stuck as TSA personnel pawed through bags already screened at the security check point.
There’s no fool-proof way to ensure security for air travel. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to inconvenience passengers while only looking like one is ensuring airline security.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Regulatory Studies
Washington Metro’s Problem: Too Much Money
The terrible Washington Metrorail crash that killed nine people has led to calls for more money for transit. Yet the real problem with Washington Metro, as with almost every other transit agency in this country, is that it has too much money — it just spends the money in the wrong places.
“More money” seems to be the solution to every transit issue. Is ridership down? Then transit agencies need more money to attract more riders. Is ridership up? Then agencies need more money because fares only cover a quarter of the costs.
Yet the truth is that urban transit is the most expensive form of transportation in the United States. Where the average auto user spends about 24 cents per passenger mile, transit costs more than 80 cents per passenger mile, three-fourths of which is subsidized by general taxpayers. Subsidies to auto driving average less than a penny per passenger mile. Where autos carry 85 percent of American passenger travel, transit carries about 1 percent.
When Congress began diverting highway user fees to transit in 1982, it gave transit agencies incentives to invest in high-cost transportation systems such as subways and light rail when lower-cost systems such as buses would often work just as well. Once they build the high-cost systems, the transit agencies never plan for the costs of reconstructing them, which is needed about every 30 years. The Washington Metro system, which was built as a “demonstration project” in the 1970s, is just a little ahead of the curve.
Now over 30 years old, Washington’s subways are beginning to break down. Before the recent accident, some of the symptoms were broken rails, smoke in the tunnels, and elevator and escalator outages.
Now we learn that the National Transportation Safety Board told Metro in 2006 to replace the cars that crashed on Monday because they were in danger of “telescoping,” which is what killed so many people in Monday’s accident. Also, the brakes were overdue for maintenance. Metro responded that it planned to eventually replace the obsolete cars, but didn’t have the money for it.
But it does have money to build an expensive new rail line to Tysons Corner and, eventually, Dulles Airport. Planners had originally recommended running bus-rapid transit along this route, but that wasn’t expensive enough so Metro decided to go with rails instead — at ten times the cost of the bus line.
The simple problem is that we have forgotten about the need to weigh revenues and costs. Instead, transit has become a favorite form of pork barrel and, for the slightly more idealistic, a method of social engineering, meaning a part of the Obama administration’s campaign to “coerce people out of their cars.”
That’s one more government program we can do without.
Turning Transportation Funding Upside-Down
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-MN) has released more than 100 pages of documents describing how he wants to run federal transportation programs over the next six years. He proposes to spend $500 billion on highways and transit, which is a huge increase over the $338 billion authorized for the last six years.
Congress authorizes federal transportation spending in six-year cycles. In 1956, when Congress created the Interstate Highway System, it dedicated gas taxes and other highway user fees exclusively to highways. But in the 1982 reauthorization, it began diverting a small amount of gas taxes to transit.
Today, about 20 percent of the federal gas taxes you pay go to subsidize transit, while the other 80 percent supposedly go for highways — though much of that is wasted in planning and earmarks. Nationally, highway subsidies — mostly at the local level — average about a penny per passenger mile, while transit subsidies — much from your federal gas tax — average more than 60 cents per passenger mile.
Since 1982, transit has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from highway users. Yet in 2008 — supposedly a boom year for transit because of high gas prices — per-capita transit ridership was lower than it was in 1990, though higher than in 2000.
Oberstar considers this to be a great success. Building on that “success,” he effectively wants to turn the formula around: 20 percent for highways and 80 percent for transit. The executive summary of his plan supposedly “provides $337.4 billion for highways.” But, in fact, only $100 billion of this is dedicated to highways; most of the rest is in “flexible funds” that states and cities can spend on either highways or transit. Nearly $100 billion goes for transit, and $50 billion goes for high-speed rail. The remaining $12.4 billion goes for safety programs.
Which Is Greener?
Which uses less energy and emits less pollution: a train, a bus, or a car? Advocates of rail transportation rely on the public’s willingness to take for granted the assumption that trains — whether light rail, subways, or high-speed intercity rail — are the most energy-efficient and cleanest forms of transportation. But there is plenty of evidence that this is far from true.
Rail advocates often reason like this: the average car has 1.1 people in it. Compare the BTUs or carbon emissions per passenger mile with those from a full train, and the train wins hands down.
The problem with such hypothetical examples is that the numbers are always wrong. As a recent study from the University of California (Davis) notes, the load factors are critical.
House Votes against “Strip-Search” Machines
Yesterday the House adopted an amendment to the Transportation Security Administration Authorization Act that would prohibit the TSA from using Whole Body-Imaging machines for primary screening at airports and require the TSA to give passengers the option of a pat-down search in place of going through a WBI machine, among other things.
You can read the amendment here, and the roll call vote will soon be up here. Use it to decide whether to cheer or jeer your member of Congress.
More on strip-search machines here, here, and here.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Secretary of Behavior Modification
George Will recently accused Obama’s token Republican, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, of being the “Secretary for Behavior Modification” because of his support for programs designed to coerce people into driving less. Speaking before the National Press Club on May 21, LaHood pleaded guilty as charged.
In the video of LaHood’s presentation, he was asked if the administration’s “livability initiative” is really “an effort to make driving more tortuous and to coerce people out of their cars.” His answer: “It is a way to coerce people out of their cars, yeah.”
The next question was, “Some conservative groups are wary of the livable communities program, saying it’s an example of government intrusion into people’s lives. How do you respond?” His complete answer: “About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives.”
Transportation Security Follies
Here’s a scene we’d like to see.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Congress to TSA: No Cheating
H.R. 2464, introduced yesterday, would prohibit the Transportation Security Administration from giving advance notice to security screeners when they are going to be covertly tested.
Does it need saying that tipping off screeners undermines the value of testing? Does TSA need a law to make it not do that?
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