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Hold Your Wallets: Congress Passes Energy and Transportation Bills

Ross Kaminsky - 8/11/2005

The newly passed Energy Bill is a 1,724 page boondoggle of subsidies and tax breaks to industries that don't need and/or don't deserve taxpayer money, ranging from the wildly profitable oil industry to stupidly wasteful billions spent on "renewable" energy. (It's not that I oppose renewables, it's simply that private industry can and would handle the development themselves if there would be a market for it. If there wouldn't, we shouldn't spend taxpayer money on projects that a profit-seeking business would not rationally support.)

There is some good news about the energy bill: It does not deal with "climate change" and I like the idea of having more daylight savings time. (Under the bill, Daylight Savings Time would start three weeks earlier and end a week later.)

In any case, even though the Energy Bill is bad news and unnecessary, it's essentially irrelevant in comparison to the Transportation Bill.

Last week, the House passed the $286.4 billion Transportation Bill by a vote of 412-8. Whenever you see a vote count like that, grab your wallet, because government is without a doubt picking your pocket. And that's certainly the case here. This bill has about 6,000 "earmarks", i.e. politicians taking your money for their pet projects.

Let's be very clear about the cost of this bill:

It comes to about $968 per person in the USA, but that still dramatically understates the situation since less than one third of the population pays income tax. A more relevant statistic is that this bill costs over $3200 per person who actually pays any income tax (of which there were about 88.5 million in 2004.)

Given that about 1/3 of income tax payers (i.e. who file and pay more than zero) pay less than $3200 in income tax, the median cost per income tax payer is much higher. In 2003, for example, over 20% of filers paid tax at a marginal rate of 10%, which stopped at $7,000 in income. By my calculations, the median cost per taxpayer for this bill is then closer to $4500!

(Statistics and calculations based on 2004 numbers from the Tax Foundation which you can see here:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/542.html
and 2003 numbers from the Tax Policy Center, which you can see here:
http://taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/tfdb/tftemplate.cfm)

This sort of spending would be considered a mark of insanity within a family and criminal negligence within a business, and it should not be tolerated of our politicians who simply use our money to buy our votes.

Depending on what you call "pork", the bill is anywhere from a travesty to a disaster. Even the liberal media like the Washington Post acknowledges $24 billion in "special projects", "including $5.9 million for a Vermont snowmobile trail and $3 million for a documentary about Alaska infrastructure."

Taxpayers for Common Sense has a list of all "earmarks" in this project. A random review comes close to making me physically ill. In almost any state, most projects are categorized as "High Priority" including such gems as:

Construct a pedestrian and bicycle bridge across TH 169, Onamia, MN ($878,080)

Delta Ponds Bike/Pedestrian Path, Oregon ($2,880,000)

And these three in a row from Georgia:
Jogging, and Bicycle Trails around CSU, Columbus ($400,000)
Streetscape-Thomasville ($240,000)
Sidewalk revitalization project in downtown Eastman ($400,000)

While there are legitimate uses of the Federal government in roads and transportation, i.e. interstate highways, most of the projects in the transportation bill are strictly on state and local roads or parks or bicycle trails.

Two of the most egregious wastes of our money are bridges in Alaska; the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committe, Don Young is from Alaska. One bridge, which will cost $231 million, will be named for Representative Young and another bridge which will cost $223 million goes to an island with 50 people living on it. Let's get this right: a bridge to a small island in Alaska at a cost of about $3 for every American income tax payer and $4,500,000 per island resident. And that's the cheaper of the two bridges for Don Young!

Even the name of the bill shows the narcissim in our senior legislators: According to the Anchorage Daily News, "the bill itself, known by its new acronym, SAFETEA-LU, is named in part for Young's wife, Lu."

Although it's futile, I think an appropriate gesture would be to urge President Bush to veto this insane pork-fest.

If there were ever a good argument for term limits, this is it: In order for the junior legislators to get their $10 million projects, they give Alaska, the Committee chairman's state, the 4th largest dollar value of earmarks after California, Illinois and New York.

You might want to sit down for this next bit of information:

The earmarks for Alaska come to over $1,500 per person (in a state without state income tax or sales tax and which sends residents a check every year because of the enormous state oil revenues.) For comparison, the second highest state earmark per person is Vermont at $544 and the United States' mean earmark per person is $86! New York's earmarks are only 4% more than Alaska's even though New York has a population over 30 times that of Alaska.

(See http://www.taxpayer.net/Transportation/safetealu/webbreakdown.pdf)

This is about nothing more than distributing money from taxpayers to the legislators in proportion to legislators' seniority in the relevant committees.

The government's behavior is truly disgusting, but after so many years of this feeding frenzy our Representatives are as addicted to this pork as any junkie to heroin. It's time to get them off the stuff but it will take some other very strong medicine, medicine which I don't think our population has the courage to administer.