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The
Virginia General Assembly came perilously close to
producing no state budget before its deadline of
June 30. The final product wasn’t pretty, but it
was better than no budget at all.
Or
was it? We saw the alternative -- a state without a
budget -- when the New Jersey legislature could not
reach agreement before its current fiscal year began
on July 1, 2006. For a week, Gov. Jon Corzine
furloughed state employees, closed state-run casinos
in Atlantic City and took other painful steps to
shut down that state’s governmental operations
while he and legislative leaders negotiated a
compromise.
One
Richmond-based journalist opined that the New Jersey
outcome was preferable to Virginia’s. He reasoned
that New Jersey, unlike Virginia, actually faced up
to its need to increase taxes even though the
government shutdown in the Garden State caused much
disruption and long-term harm to that state’s
reputation. Once again, the pro-tax bias of the
media was on display.
The
underlying presupposition of many in the media is
that there is no choice other than to increase taxes
every few years to accommodate a rising population
and the growing complexity of our social and
economic conditions. This view takes the constant
expansion of government as a given.
One
wonders if these media types have thought about the
inevitable end of such a process, which will come
when government has nothing left to tax.
There
are many reasons for the constant expansion of
government, but inevitability isn’t one of them.
The principal reasons are the absence of political
leadership and the want of imagination on the part
of the public.
Consider
government’s role in transportation.
Politicians like the current pattern even though it
hasn’t been working for decades. They point to
their efforts to bring home the bacon in the form of
new transportation projects. They issue press
releases when projects are announced. They relish
the photo opportunity when they don hard hats and
turn a shovel of earth in the symbolic beginning of
construction. They have another photo opportunity at
the ribbon-cutting ceremony that puts the project in
service. If they are in office long enough, they may
even have projects named after them.
Because
politicians and the media repeat the proposition
that more government spending will relieve traffic
congestion, the public tends to believe there is no
other option. Politicians refuse to acknowledge the
futility of addressing traffic problems with more of
the same failed strategy. The commuter stuck in
traffic and the parent struggling to ferry a child
to soccer practice in gridlock conditions want
something done. This is the perfect storm for
another massive tax hike.
The
same pressures produced the 1986 transportation tax
increase. That infusion of general tax revenues
didn’t make a dent in traffic congestion then and
another tax revenue infusion won’t work now for
the same reason.
The
causes of congestion are many and their interplay
highly complex. It’s easier for politicians to
support another tax hike than to explain why a
different strategy is needed. Yet, a majority of
Virginians repeatedly demonstrate that they are
ahead of the politicians and the media. Most
understand at some level that the tax-and-spend
approach can’t continue forever, particularly if
they lived through the 1986 experience of being
promised a solution if only taxes were increased.
Gov.
Timothy M. Kaine campaigned on opposition to pouring
more money into new transportation projects without
considering the impact on growth and development. He
seems to have forgotten that position, just as he
has ignored his campaign statements that he
wouldn’t support a tax increase.
Unless
a major shift in policy occurs, Virginia is heading
toward another fleecing of the average taxpayer with
no hope of improving the overall transportation
system. More roads may be built with increased tax
revenues, but relief will be short-term at best.
Let’s
look at the history of one project to illustrate the
point. The final 17-mile segment of Route 288 on the
west of the Richmond region was financed with
general tax revenues and relied heavily on debt. It
drained millions of dollars from other regions of
the state. Much of the general fund surplus spent on
transportation as a result of the 2005 state budget
amendments went to pay off the Route 288 debt.
When
the final 17-mile leg of Route 288 went into service
in 2004, it was already at Level of Service B (A
being the most desirable and F being absolute
gridlock). The Virginia Department of Transportation
projects Level of Service F for this segment by the
year 2010.
The
reason is that this project, as is the case with so
many new road projects, generates far more traffic
than it could possibly relieve and accelerates the
pattern of sprawl that makes any future
transportation fix prohibitively expensive.
Virginia
has an opportunity to break this unfortunate
tax-and-spend pattern in 2006. Will the politicians
meet that challenge or will we look back a decade
from now and wonder why they showed so little
foresight and courage?
--
July 24, 2006
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