Clinton should punish GOP with highway bill

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 18, 1998 | by Deroy Murdock

The Republican revolution has come to this: Free-market activists are praying that a presidential veto will stop the GOP Congress before it spends again. At an April Cato Institute Policy Forum entitled "Road to Hell?," representatives of the National Taxpayers Union, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other watchdog groups urged President Clinton to veto the so-called highway bill. Republicans who overwhelmingly supported this measure richly deserve such a public spanking.

This legislation is known officially as the Building Efficient Surface Transportation and Equity Act, or BESTEA. BEAST is more like it. This 534-page monstrosity would spend $219 billion over six years and exceed the expenditure ceiling in last August's five-year balanced-budget deal by $30 billion. Just eight months after its adoption, the reputedly thrifty Republican Congress has shown all the self-restraint one might expect at a Las Vegas bachelor party.

Most Republican elders cheered as this milestone of GOP governance easily passed both houses of Congress before proceeding to a conference committee for reconciliation. Rep. John Boehner, chairman of the House Republican Conference, and Rep. John Kasich, chairman of the Budget Committee, both of Ohio, and Rep. Chris Cox of California, were among the few teetotalers at this bacchanal. BESTEA mocks Ronald Reagan's legacy, and should bring tears of joy to FDR, wherever he is.

Forty-three percent larger than the previous highway bill, BESTEA dedicates $28.5 billion for interstate-highway maintenance and $26.6 billion for bridge upkeep. The $164 billion balance is for new goodies, including 1,467 pork-barrel items. In 1991, a Democratic Congress packed only about 580 such boondoggles into BESTEA's predecessor. These $18.3 billion in high-priority projects include a few sensible items. While they needn't be federal concerns, it's otherwise hard to argue with a "$2 million seismic retrofit" of the Golden Gate Bridge, as BESTEA states, or $1.4 million to "Upgrade 14 warning devices on the east/west rail line from Gary to Auburn," Ind.

How, though, can congressmen justify $2.88 million to "Improve Hardscrabble Road from Route 22 to June Road in North Salem," N.Y.? How about $8 million to "Widen 143rd Street in Orland Park," Ill.? Citizens of Allentown, Pa. can look forward to the "America on Wheels Transportation Museum," an "Interpretive Center" at the National Canal Museum and more; cost: $7 million. BESTEA contains no fewer than 51 bike-path projects worth $113.6 million, all subsidized by motorists' gas taxes. Many initiatives are in affluent communities that don't need money siphoned from the wallets of barmaids and busboys: $15 million buys a "Traffic-Calming Project" in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Glen Cove, N.Y., gets waterfront improvements worth $5 million; $1.8 million helps purchase a pedestrian promenade and yet another bikeway between San Luis Obispo and Pismo Beach, Calif. In this trickle-up spirit, the "Recreational Trails" program includes $270 million for "purposes such as bicycling, cross-country skiing, day hiking, equestrian activities, jogging and similar activities"--including bobsledding.

The most honest money grab is a $10 million South Carolina plan to "Construct high-priority surface-transportation projects eligible for federal-aid highway funds."

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania is the driving force behind this asphalt nightmare. "No blade of grass in America is safe as long as Bud Shuster is head of that committee," quips Cato scholar Stephen Moore. On April 9, Ann Eppard -- Shuster's former chief of staff -- was indicted for allegedly accepting $230,000 in illegal payments from three Bostonians involved in a multibillion-dollar underground highway project nicknamed the "Big Dig." Eppard denies the charges.

Vetoing BESTEA would be a lavish freebie for President Clinton. He can appear statesmanlike and more fiscally prudent than the GOP Congress. Should Republicans call him a big spender, he can bite his lower lip and wag a copy of BESTEA in their faces. Meanwhile, Congress likely would override his veto, giving Democrats plenty of ribbons to cut before the November elections.

With the GOP having abandoned its free-market principles, President Clinton ought to do what Republicans should have done in the first place. He should fight to slash the gas tax. As Rep. Kasich proposed in vain, the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax should be cut to 3 cents exclusively to finance maintenance of the interstate-highway system and other federal roads. States can fund highway improvements through their own taxes or even encourage such innovations as private toll roads. Any unallocated federal gas-tax revenues would return to the states through proportional block grants.

Such decentralization also would free states from the mandates that weak-kneed Republicans preserved, namely the costly Davis-Bacon Act and race and gender-based set-asides. They also would be liberated from federal micromanagement, such as a requirement that bridges be treated with "sodium acetate/formate, or agriculturally derived, environmentally acceptable, minimally corrosive anti-icing and deicing compositions."