Northbound

This is an article I sent to NRO that they, wisely, decided not to publish. And I’m OK with that. Really, I am. (Although I suppose I could try to interest some other online conservative publication in this stuff… maybe next time.) Anyway, I’m on vacation until after Labor Day, and thought y’all might enjoy the following.

Oh, admit it, it’s easy to gripe about the new highway appropriation bill that President Bush signed into law. It is appallingly long; over 700 pages if one were to print it off the Web. There’s its stunning, exorbitant cost: $286.5 billion dollars, over six years. And the cost escalates significantly over that time period, starting at $33 billion in 2004 and ending at $40 billion in 2009. The bill – the “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users”, or SAFTEA-LU for short – is famously riddled with $24 billion in pork-barrel excess. And any piece of legislation that makes Senator Charles Schumer “giddy with excitement,” as he told the New York Sun, can’t help but raise the hackles of conservatives.

But I am not complaining, not one little bit.

I am not complaining because I live in central New Jersey, a few blocks away from a major highway. It’s the highway I take to work every day, along with thousands upon thousands of other New Jersey citizens. The highway has almost been worn down to its concrete slab. The only places you see asphalt in some stretches are where the road has been patched. The northbound lanes are crumbling badly.

The highway is badly in need of repairs, and repair work is going badly. Orange traffic cones are everywhere. Heavy road-building equipment is parked on the shoulder haphazardly, almost randomly. Road crews, working mostly at night, have steadily been chipping away at the surface. In one spot near my home, they’ve actually resurfaced the southbound lanes for a distance of two miles. (The southbound lanes were in much better shape, so naturally they were the ones to get resurfaced first.)

At this point, I am in favor of anything that will get the construction completed, get the highway resurfaced, and get those orange cones moving to some other highway. I have no complaints about the part of the bill that’s reserved for highway maintenance – about $4 billion a year. The exorbitant federal gasoline tax takes in about $20 billion a year, more than enough to pay for the heavy equipment and asphalt and guys with jackhammers needed to repair my highway and those like it nationwide. If that’s all the SAFTEA-LU aspired to do, it would be a necessary – one could almost say worthy – piece of legislation.

However, the SAFTEA-LU (named, allegedly, after Lu Young, wife of Alaska’s Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee) does much, much more than that, including lots of things that it has no business doing. Even the most cursory glance at the legislation shows how dodgy many of the provisions are. There’s $470 million a year for something called the “Appalachian Development Highway System Program”, which translates into “lots more highways named after Senator Byrd”. There’s funding available for “magnetic levitation transportation programs”, which makes one wonder if there’s also funding available for Star Trek transporter beams. There’s also three million dollars going to the “National Packard Museum” in Ohio, for those favoring a more nostalgic approach to the whole transportation issue.

The part of SAFTEA-LU that has gotten all the media attention is the part that conservative budget critics most love to pounce on – Section 1702, which lists all the budget earmarks for specific transportation-related projects. (All of which are marked as “High Priority Projects”, and I’d hate to see how long the low-priority project list is.) It’s by far the largest section of the legislation, with exactly 2,000 specific line items. (The House version had 3,676 such items.) The projects range from the small ($100,000 for a traffic signal in California) to the large ($10 million for a parking garage at the Harlem Hospital Complex in New York) to the deeply weird ($750,000 for a pedestrian bridge for an Oakland, California golf course). The massive $100 million appropriation for a bridge in rural Alaska (masterminded by the aforementioned Rep. Don Young) is here as well, along with thousands of other assorted local projects. I wish I could say I read the whole list, but I burned out on road extensions and bike paths and parking lots and visitor’s centers along about item number 1832, which gave $4.25 million to Virginia for the “Jamestown 2007” project. There’s enough money allocated to those projects to buy all the orange cones on the market, and then some.

It is true that SAFTEA-LU could have been much, much worse. President Bush signed the bill into law, after threatening a veto if spending was over a set threshold. Without that veto threat, the bill might have reached $400 billion, or more. The Administration could have insisted – almost certainly should have insisted – on even deeper cuts and more accountability in the appropriations process. It is clear that, even with Republican leadership in the House and Senate, that Congress has no interest in self-discipline and moderation in appropriations.

When Phil Gramm was in the Senate, he famously applied the “Dicky Flatt test”, named after a hard-working Mexia, Texas printer. “Will the benefits to be derived by spending money on this program”, Gramm asked, “be worth taking the money away from Dicky Flatt to pay for it?” Not a lot of programs meet the Dicky Flatt test; pedestrian bridges to golf courses don’t even come close. It says something that one of the few Senate votes against the bill was Senator John Cornyn, who holds Phil Gramm’s old Senate seat. It says something that one of the very few House votes against the bill was Representative Jeb Hensarling, from the Fifth District of Texas, who (like the author) is a former Gramm aide. Cornyn and Hensarling understand the importance of the Dicky Flatt test. It’s a pity that other Congressional Republicans seem to have forgotten it.