Posted on 06/07/2014 5:17:07 AM PDT by bestintxas
The Highway Trust Fund is running on fumes, and this is sending certain congressmen and the administration into a tizzy. The administration insists that America’s roads are crumbling, the bridges tumbling, and Congress must raise taxes, or else.
“If they don’t act by the end of the summer,” President Obama says, “federal funding for transportation projects will run out — will run out. There will be no money. The cupboard will be bare.”
This is a classic Washington crisis by the numbers. Congress sets up a “trust fund” — in this case, the Highway Trust Fund — and depletes it by spending the cash on projects that have nothing to do with highways. When there’s no money left, taxes must be raised.
The Obama administration sells this fanciful tale with claims that America’s cars and trucks have been made magically more fuel-efficient by government fiat, and since everybody is paying less than ever in taxes on gasoline, raising the tax on gasoline won’t actually hurt. It might sound plausible, but that’s not the story the numbers tell. In 2009, gross receipts for the gasoline tax were $24.6 billion. Every year since, they’ve gone up, to the most recent accounting of $25.5 billion. Separate taxes imposed on diesel fuel for the big rigs brings the total sum to $41.3 billion.
That’s a lot of money, and it’s keeping America’s roads and bridges in the best condition in decades. According to a Cato Institute review of
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
The cameras are there for your safety don’tcha know?
How can one tell? It’s the government doing the collecting and disbursing.
Excusing single payer for highways is a slippery slope towards excuses for single payer healthcare.
No HOV lanes is where they started after tollways and it’s only a matter of tine If no one objects to it. I think they want to head to where they charge you for regular roadway driving. Essentially, the automated license plates gives them a license to rape the public.
cams can’t protect you from accidents caused by those damn islands they installed to far out in the roadway, they should be at least 1.5 feet below what they are installed at, so you can make a SAFE turn in to the correct lane. they just get you a ticket, it is a win-win for any city hurting for money.
I’ve had a beef with normal government tollways myself; double taxation, albeit paying the double tax more directly of course and no “discount” because of the toll. The license-plate scan started with government tollways, and yes, it’s a stepping stone to other government overreach.
Cities hurting for money ought to scrap welfare, taxation and regulation and actually attract jobs in. Then they won’t be hurting for money. (Problem is, those with no moral upbringing will prefer welfare and crime to jobs.)
Your point about the railroads is valid in some ways, but there is a major problem with it: How many of these railroads were constructed using enormous government resources as well as the government's power of eminent domain to forcibly seize private property from its rightful owners?
In terms of privately-owned toll roads and their financial stability ... Did you ever wonder why most of the investors that purchased the long-term leases on these toll roads were foreign companies? It's because institutional investors here in the U.S. were too smart to get involved in them. Having the governor of Indiana running around highlighting his credentials as a smart leader by pointing out how badly he screwed the new "owner" of the Indiana Turnpike makes that point clear.
No; there were many tollways, in fact. One of the more poignant ones was the Middlesex and Essex Turnpike in New Jersey, which got converted into the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line (today’s Northeast Corridor). Many toll bridges too, never mind tolled ferries.
International companies took over government toll roads here because of the bidding process that excluded domestic companies, never mind the regulatory bias against domestic companies. When the government controls the playing field, they tend to play favorites. Same goes for commuter rail and transit bus contracts, which favor foreign companies also.
Maybe yes, maybe no, you would need to take it up with Ike and a (mostly) long dead congress.
One thing that can NOT be disputed is that the Interstate Highway System transformed the country. It's allowed a freedom to travel, as well as to ship goods, easier and substantially faster than what it replaced. A trip from Kansas City to New York can be accomplished in less than 24 hours taking I-70 from KC to PA, then through the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Delaware Water Gap, then on through NJ, which takes you right to NYC. Before the Interstates, it took narly three times as long, since the older system takes the driver through major metropolitan areas, i.e. stop-lights.
Comparing interstate highways to either the old US highway system, or even worse, to State highways is simply impossible.
More importantly, it was a different time. The public was more trusting of the government, probably with very good reason.
Mark
I don’t think I need to take it up with a government that no longer exists, especially if today’s government is perpetuating the fraud and thus keeping it alive. (Does this mean I have to take up the welfare state problem with LBJ and his congress? or Amtrak with Nixon and his congress?) Single-payer highwaycare was always going to hit this wall; watch it happen to single-payer airportcare too.
The interstate highway system did not “transform” the country any more than any other transportation mode. Unless the argument is that it made the country more liberal. I suspect that different effects would have come about if the project were 100 percent built, owned and funded by the private sector. People’s trust in government, whether justified or not (history suggests not), was the problem there too, especially when the lessons from the Founding Fathers were ignored then as they are today.
In Austin and other smaller cities, the turn lanes are being widened and lengthened at major intersections. There are several in Williamson county that have had major construction projects as of late. It is a pain now, but should help traffic flow.
BUT, they are adding bike lanes to many roads. I think people riding bikes should pay a bike tax, since the state or city added and restriped the road for them alone. Also in Austin, they used one lane of traffic on several major north to south roads for sole use by city busses. Driving in that lane will get you a $500 ticket.
Typical liberal scam
Didn’t we do two infrastructure stimuli already?
In terms of the private toll road situation today, your statement about the exclusion of domestic companies is flat-out wrong. Trust me -- if Goldman Sachs wanted to lease the Indiana Turnpike on behalf of its clients, it could do so tomorrow. It would probably get a preferential option for it, too.
The major reasons why foreign companies dominated these bids were:
1. These investors saw these toll roads as an opportunity to get their hands on a fairly predictable cash flow in U.S. dollars. You'll notice that many of these transactions took place right around the same time as the controversy about foreign-owned companies buying leases on U.S. port terminals. For these investors, the deal was as much about a currency exchange hedge as it was about long-term value as you and I might measure it.
2. Smart U.S. investors stayed away from these deals because they knew there was a huge risk that couldn't be measured accurately and was effectively unlimited: lawsuits. In a nation where 30,000+ people die in motor vehicle accidents every year, and where it sometimes seems like there are more lawyers than people, acquiring an ownership stake in a major highway is one of the dumbest investment decisions you can ever make. The private owner of the road immediately becomes a potential target in a civil lawsuit every time a crash occurs on the road, and since the road is now a "private" asset instead of a "public" thoroughfare the private owner doesn't have the protection of sovereign immunity that a government would have. In fact, there was a landmark court case in Indiana relating to this very issue just in the last year or two -- and the private company that holds the lease on the road lost the case.
P.S. I agree with most of what you’ve posted here. I’m not a fan of government involvement in most of these things, but the history of the development of transportation infrastructure in the U.S. is riddled with examples of how seriously flawed the whole idea of “private ownership” actually is.
I don’t see any flaws; all I see is government ownership where the private sector would have sufficed/would suffice.
You don’t believe that foreign owners of toll roads are subject to being sued?
Of course the foreign owners of these toll roads are subject to civil lawsuits. My point was that because those countries are used to doing business in places where they're not subject to those kinds of risks, they didn't look at these risks with the same level of heightened scrutiny that U.S. investors did.
So you’re saying that US railroads have to be owned by the federal government to be deregulated? That is absurd. The example of Conrail (the other federal railroad) speaks to the very opposite. Same goes for the USRA, the federal takeover of all railroads that was a disaster until they were put back in private hands.
In addition, the regulations only existed to destroy the railroads ultimately, which was coupled with the federal government “competing” against them with the road mode. There is no benefit to any government involvement whatsoever.
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