GOP just became party of reckless runaway spending
A good friend of mine has earned a salary of about $100,000 for many years now. Not bad, but he spends a lot more than that.
Some years, it’s $110,000, others $115,000, but that credit card bill has really gotten out of control.
He now owes about what he makes every year.
Luckily, he has a plan to fix it. Not only will he avoid worrying about his debt, he won’t need to change his lifestyle one whit. He called me with the great news.
“The credit card company just raised my limit!”
I’d rather not name my friend. Let’s call him Mitch. Maybe Nancy. Or Donald.
Comparing a complex national economy to a household budget is obviously flawed, but the basic law of economics remains.
numbers of Valley Metro. Despite large dollops of increased funding, the use of public transportation isn’t increasing.
That’s in significant part because fixed rail is eating up a huge share of the funding. Fixed rail is expensive and inefficient. Although fixed rail gets the lion’s share of the funding, three times as many Valley residents take the bus.
It is true that the federal government picks up most of the construction costs of fixed rail. But counting on that longterm may be a bad bet. The federal government is broke and a fiscal day of reckoning will be coming. The Trump administration has already proposed that the federal government reduce the extent to which it underwrites local fixed rail construction projects.
But looking at how many federal dollars are attracted isn’t the right way to evaluate how local funds should be spent. Instead, the question is how much our public transportation system is improved for the local dollars invested. Buses provide a bigger bang for the local buck. And they won’t be as much of an expensive white elephant if ridehailing autonomous vehicles turn out to be the true public transportation of the future.
Prop. 105 would prohibit spending from a special transportation sales tax for extensions of the fixed rail system. From there, however, the proposition goes downhill.
If the most expensive element of the system is to be eliminated, the logical thing to do would be to reduce the tax.
The second most logical thing would be to reroute the money to expanding the bus system, so at least Phoenix might get closer to a public transportation system that is a reasonable alternative to a car.
Proposition 105 does neither of those things. In fact, it suffers from the same flaw as the proposition increasing the transportation sales tax that voters approved in 2015.
The tax remains the same, 0.7 percent. All the money goes into a transportation slush fund, to be spent however a future city council decides. Just not on fixed rail.
Eligible projects include “public roads, medians, sidewalks, streetlights, autonomous transit, ridesharing, bike lanes, improved ADA accessibility, and electric bus and other bus and dial-aride services.”
The campaign slogan for the proponents is “fix our roads.” But there is nothing in Prop. 105 that guarantees that another dime will be spent on road repairs. Where the money saved from pulling the plug on fixed rail extensions will go is a complete political crapshoot.
There was a need for a tax increase to improve the public transportation system. It’s just been ill-spent.
There was not a need for a tax increase to pay for medians, sidewalks, streetlights and bike lanes. Such things should compete with other priorities for funding through the city’s $1.3 billion general fund.
In this respect, Prop. 105 is no worse than the status quo. All those things are