Democrats like to use Interstate funds for downstream maintenance though.
So, what you are telling us is that the Interstate highway program is working as it was designed to work.
That might be news
I’m pointing out that even there, the feds don’t pay all costs from the trust fund. Medicaid Part D has no trust fund at all. SCHIP was greatly expanded with no honest funding stream. Unemployment for 23 weeks comes funded, but Congress regularly increases those benefits without any funding stream - just general revenue.
There ARE examples where the government has stayed honest. My military retirement has been almost entirely (from 84 on) paid for as we go. And oddly enough, it is one of the few things the Democrats want to change, although its costs are very low for a funded retirement system.
But on the whole, we have 60 cents of taxes paying for a dollar of ‘benefit’, although I think in reality there is so much fraud and waste that our 60 cents probably buys most of us well under 50 cents of value. I cannot recall ever seeing a skinny poor person using food stamps. Most that I’ve seen have been grossly obese, while news articles indicate it is common for food stamps to be sold 50 cents on the dollar to fund drugs. My daughter’s neighbor offered her a 3:1 ratio of food stamps for cash, but my daughter told her to go to hell.
But many of those programs were started to allow ‘us’ to feel good about ourselves. Arizona has Medicaid funding problems because VOTERS passed an initiative greatly expanding eligibility without valid funding:
” Arizona voters enacted Proposition 204 in 2000, which increased Medicaid eligibility for residents up to 100% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), including parents and childless adults. Prop 204 stated that this was to be paid for using the tobacco litigation settlement money and available funding.
• On January 1, 2009 there were 238,000 members enrolled in the Prop 204 expansion. As of January 1, 2011 this number had grown to 377,000....
...If the waiver is granted, the Governor’s budget includes a rollback of the Prop. 204 populations effective October 1, 2011. This rollback is expected to impact approximately 280,000 Arizonans.
• The overall AHCCCS population would drop to level supported by the program on September 2007.”
It was ‘sold’ as using tobacco settlement money, but also required the state to fund it as needed. A recent decision has opened the door to cut it with the judge ruling that voters cannot bind the legislature to open-ended funding.
http://www.azleg.gov/jlbc/ballotprop204.pdf