Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana
It is working just fine in Chicago, Atlanta and Denver, to give an example from each region of the country where you claim it won't.
Did it ever occur to you that everyone is paying for roads, too? It's not just the gasoline tax that funds a road system.
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Roads and highways pays for themselves via the highway trust fund. Every gallon of gasoline has an 18 cent tax dedicated to rebuilding our roads. The more we use, the more we pay.
Our biggest problem with the highway trust fund is diversion of money in it to mass transit and "other" uses.
Remember the bridge collapse a few years ago. Turns out the bridge that failed was known to need significant investment since 1999. Instead of investing in repair of the bridge, which is what the highway trust fund is for, lovely Democrats diverted cash to subsidize an unused mass transit system. Those same Democrats who only days earlier had diverted 85% of the highway trust fund money in the congressional district of the bridge collapse to non-highway repair and building purposes came out to cry after the collapse and demand even more money in the form of higher taxes. Not one admitted to diverting money from the highway system and highway maintenance to other purposes.
In recent years, highway money has been diverted to build parks, bike paths, levee's, mass transit, parking garages in urban areas, and I believe a few special schools. Our politicians steal from the self paying highway system and use the money for mass transit.
Now that you know the truth, what is your next argument?
Democrats taking long road back to fiscal waste - Washington Times
If any doubt persisted about the futility of President-elect Barack Obama's forthcoming economic stimulus plan, it can safely be put to rest now that one of its chief congressional architects has revealed his intentions.
Rep. James L. Oberstar, Minnesota Democrat and the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recently proposed a shift in the plan's infrastructure spending away from highways and bridges and toward mass transit.
This follows a successful vote in the House last summer dedicating tax dollars to fund the operating costs for bus and rail systems, the first time Congress has ever considered funding anything but capital outlays for local transit.
Mr. Oberstar's bill would give mass transit 40 percent of the funding allocated for highways and bridges, a remarkable departure from current policy, but not so remarkable for Minnesota's potentate of pork.
Mr. Oberstar has long sought to not only raise gas taxes, but to fund almost anything that comes across his desk as long as some of it winds up in Minnesota's 8th District. In 2005, Mr. Oberstar touted his mastery in bringing home $12 million out of a so-called transportation bill. Yet $10 million was for non-road uses, such as pedestrian trails, bicycle paths and, yes, mass-transit centers for that burgeoning metropolis known as Duluth.
The shamelessness is nothing new. Long before Rahm Emanuel was admonishing liberal Democrats to "never allow a crisis to go to waste," Mr. Oberstar was standing on the banks of the Mississippi River just days after the tragic collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge demanding a 23.4-cent federal gas tax. Rather than wait for the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, which cited engineering defects when the bridge was originally built, Mr. Oberstar boldly, if not predictably, suggested that a lack of federal transportation revenue was somehow to blame.
But the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 has diverted 20 percent of each increase in federal gas tax revenues to the Mass Transit Account. Indeed, federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars on transit schemes that have done nothing to justify their supposed rationale of reducing congestion. In 2005, the now infamous $286 billion "bridge to nowhere" bill lost an astonishing $76 billion to transit and earmarks.
In short, we don't have a spending crisis; we have an investment crisis.
For example, the three-quarter-billion, 12-mile Hiawatha light-rail line - sold as just the first step for the sprawling Twin Cities metro area - runs annual deficits (expenses less fares) of $10 million as far as the eye can see.
But the fact that only 4.8 percent of the area's commuters use transit at all, according to the 2005 American Community Survey, didn't stop Minnesota state politicians from dedicating $1.1 billion of last year's $6.6 billion "transportation" tax increase for local mass-transit projects, including the Central Corridor light-rail project, scheduled to run from downtown St. Paul to Minneapolis.
Fundamentally, these costly rail schemes ($40 million to $50 million per mile) amount to little more than smart-growth subsidies for urban interests trying to force jobs and people back to the inner city. For the cost of the new Central Corridor line, transportation officials could widen the entire beltway around the Twin Cities.
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