The Obamacare debacle has rendered last month’s much-maligned government shutdown a distant memory for many of us. But we may not miss it for long.
If the factions in Congress hold firm — a good bet — we’ll watch another episode of shutdown theater early next year. And with it will come the usual recriminations about how a shutdown threatens funding for things deemed apolitical: schools, national parks, roads and bridges.
All spending, however, is political when political actors are in charge. That’s why one answer is to shift as much of it as possible down from the federal level.
The federal Department of Transportation doesn’t actually build roads; state DOTs do. Yet a huge part of states’ transportation budgets comes from fuel taxes paid and collected in states, passed through Washington, and then returned to the states, albeit attached to federal priorities that may or may not match the locals’ druthers.
Imagine if, instead of roughly $54 billion in federal transportation funding being in limbo due to disagreements between the House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, Congress and the president, the vast majority of that money never left the states in the first place.
Rather than making states scramble to pay for projects or factor federal uncertainty into their planning, infrastructure improvements would proceed despite acrimony in Washington.
Congress could still take a portion of the gas tax for truly interstate projects, and allow states to keep the rest. The feds could even call this a kind of waiver, and require states to keep the tax at a certain level to qualify for it, if this devolution of power would make some people worry about the potential for crumbling infrastructure.
Speaking of which: In February, President Barack Obama proposed a $50 billion, national “fix it first” program to address, among other things, “the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.”
But unsafe bridges and poorly maintained roads don’t appear evenly from sea to shining sea. As the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole noted in February, many states have greatly improved their bridge conditions over the past 20 years.
“But 10 states actually allowed their bridge conditions to get worse over this time period, including Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island,” Poole wrote. “It’s states like these that need to step up their game on bridge repair, not the nation’s taxpayers overall.”
In case you’re wondering, Georgia has the nation’s 17th-lowest percentage of bridges that are deficient. Reason’s most recent annual report on highways found less than 18 percent of our state’s bridges are deficient — about one-third the level of the worst state, Rhode Island (53 percent), and less than half that of Pennsylvania (39 percent), Hawaii (38 percent) and New York (37 percent).
And lest you believe northern states have it worse than the South simply because of their climate, Reason’s 10 highest overall highway performance ratings went to states whose winters are plenty brutal, including the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and Nebraska. (Georgia ranked 12th.)
Keeping so much of our transportation spending in Washington’s hands not only subjects it to federal feuds. It can also lead to out-of-whack priorities and favoritism for states that haven’t taken care of their own business.
