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"Awesome! So lets spend, like, a trillion dollars, and employ 48,000,000 people! Or better yet, lets spend ten trillion, and employ everyone in the country and then some! w00t!"

It's better to spend the gas tax revenues than let it accumulate.

For two years, gas taxes have been accumulating in the gasoline trust fund. You received ZERO benefit from those taxes, yet you had to pay it at the pump.

If this Highway Bill had been $100 Billion, then there would have been taxes left out of circulation, away from our economy.

Now granted, it would be great to kill the gas tax, but that's not what you're advocating. You're screaming that the gas tax money should remain locked in the gas trust fund out of circulation from our economy.

That's nuts.

You're screaming that the gas tax money should remain locked in the gas trust fund out of circulation from our economy. That's nuts.

Mostly, I'm knocking the Keynesian assumption that for each billion we spend, 48K jobs are created. That means that two billion creates 96K jobs, and 150 trillion creates over six billion jobs. At what point do diminishing returns set in? Probably well short of the one billion mark, since the figure is itself probably an extrapolation, and a similar assumption of linearity was probably made. (Forgive me--I am a mathematician. When a dog looks out the window and barks, he's probably looking at the poodle, not the cute babe.)

But on the subject that you raise, I would be astonished beyond measure if gas tax revenues honestly were sitting in some account untouched. If they weren't mixed with general revenues and spent, I'll truly need to go to bed early to get over the shock.

As for funding, federal funding of roads is unconstitutional. It should be handled at the state and local level. I'd even be game to see some sort of privatization, for that matter. But the feds should neither tax gas nor build roads.

Nice to see some/your informed comments.

Folks can argue what they will on the trust fund or the gas tax, but to blame it all on this bill is silly, and ignorant. The Administration conducted this legislation with determination and guts. There are some key reforms in it that are from the Administration alone that will go long ways to changing the way we pay for roads.

(Tolls anyone? and that's a good thing.)

I'm working just now on the history of state road building programs post-WWII. It's a complex mess made stupid by the New Deal. And it didn't have to be the way it was. This research has turned me into a great fan of the NJ Turnpike, which was a brave, world-shattering project.