We have adopted an ideology of national decline, a can’t-do mindset that’s been gussied up with distractions about protecting liberty and shrinking government, but an ideology of decline nonetheless.
Here’s just one example: Back in 1993, we spent $1.10 to buy a gallon of gasoline, and the federal gasoline tax accounted for 18.4 cents of that amount.
Today, the price of gasoline has roughly tripled, but the federal gasoline tax hasn’t increased a fraction of a cent. Add in the fact that we drive considerably farther today on a gallon of gasoline than we did 20 years ago, and the buying power of the federal gasoline tax — long the bedrock of our national surface transportation system — has fallen by roughly half.
Then we wonder why we’re stuck in traffic, our roads are potholed and our bridges collapse. As those Americans who have traveled overseas will tell you, our basic infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, rail, mass transit — is distinctly inferior in design, maintenance and reach to many of our competitors. Given that our nation is much more sprawling than almost all of our competitors in the developed world, that puts us at a distinct disadvantage.
And as economists will tell you, failure to spend in the public sector merely shifts costs to the private sector — costs reflected in longer transportation times, less workforce accessibility, and the inability to move raw material and finished products. Congestion costs in metro Atlanta alone are estimated at more than $3 billion a year by the Texas Transportation Institute.
However, it’s the reaction to our situation that tells us how dire things have gotten. We still like to tell ourselves that we are the richest, most prosperous nation on earth, yet we also tell ourselves that we can’t afford what our competitors can afford. The push in Congress isn’t to restore at least part of the buying power of the gasoline tax; instead, congressmen such as U.S. Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia are pushing to all but end the federal role in transportation.
Under Graves bill, the federal gasoline tax would be slashed from 18.4 cents to 3.7 cents a gallon, with the idea being that states could then pick up the funding slack. According to his website, Graves’ bill “allows states to respond to the needs of their communities and develop systems that result in less traffic, shorter commutes, access to more affordable homes, and will help families better manage the work-life balance.”
What a fantasy. Nobody familiar with the history of the Georgia Department of Transportation would describe its record of spending decisions as data-driven, unless by “data-driven” you mean driven by data about where the politically well-connected own property. Audits have been uniformly scathing in their criticism of the agency. In actual real life, not the life imagined in a bad Ayn Rand novel, giving total control of transportation investment to the politicians under the Gold Dome would be disastrous.
Furthermore, anybody who thinks that Georgia state legislators would vote to increase state taxes to compensate for the disappearance of federal revenue again has not paid attention. State government already starves its transportation sector — we’re 49th in per capita transportation spending — and the best the Legislature could muster in recent years was a scheme to dump responsibility for raising revenue onto voters through the convoluted T-SPLOST process.
Since that failed, no Plan B has emerged. We’re apparently going straight to Plan F, for Failure.
