When You Ride Alone …

Speaking of the Highway Trust Fund — talk of federal gasoline taxes reminded me that very early in the Bush Administration there was a big push to keep HTF money from being spent on mass transit.

Very basically, the gas taxes are collected by the federal government, which takes its cut and then allocates the remainder as the federal government sees fit. According to the Department of Transportation, “Of the 18.3 cents collected per gallon of gas, 12 cents goes into the highway account, 2 cents goes into the mass transit account, and 4.3 cents is credited to the general fund of the Treasury.”

So back in July 2001 some guy from the Heritage Foundation, naturally, complained that “our roads” were suffering because of the 2 cents that went to mass transit. “Our roads” need that 2 cents. And most of the mass transit money went to a handful of “rich” (read “blue”) states, anyway!

In the case of Virginia, as well as 24 other mostly Southern states, the amount of money returned is less than the taxes paid, while the other 26 states, mostly in the North, get more back than they pay. … today as much as 18 percent of trust-fund revenues paid by motorists are reserved for transit programs that benefit only a tiny fraction of commuters–currently about 5 percent.

Moreover, federal transit spending suffers from regional imbalances that are worse than those for highway spending. In 1999, more than 50 percent of federal transit spending went to just five states–California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.

I never realized that California and Texas were in the north, but never mind. I remember that some Republican politicians proposed sending all the money collected in federal gas taxes within a state back to that state, minus the federal share. That way, poor and hard-driving red states wouldn’t end up subsidizing rich mass transit-riding blue states. I recall some guy — I think it was a Texas congressman, but I can’t find a link — making speeches about the evils of subsidized (read “socialist”) urban mass transit versus good ol’ all American payin’-for-themselves highways stretching across the heartland.

One problem with that idea is that overall the federal taxes collected in blue states subsidize more programs in red states than the other way around. Paul Krugman wrote in May 2002,

As a group, red states pay considerably less in taxes than the federal government spends within their borders; blue states pay considerably more. Over all, blue America subsidizes red America to the tune of $90 billion or so each year.

And within the red states, it’s the metropolitan areas that pay the taxes, while the rural regions get the subsidies. When you do the numbers for red states without major cities, you find that they look like Montana, which in 1999 received $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it paid in federal taxes. The numbers for my home state of New Jersey were almost the opposite. Add in the hidden subsidies, like below-cost provision of water for irrigation, nearly free use of federal land for grazing and so on, and it becomes clear that in economic terms America’s rural heartland is our version of southern Italy: a region whose inhabitants are largely supported by aid from their more productive compatriots.

I dimly remember Senator Schumer suggesting that maybe the “blue” states should get back all their taxes, too, and how would you like them apples?

And it’s not like mass transit consumers are getting a free ride. If you commute into Manhattan on the Metro North Railroad, for example, you pay between $123 and $357 a month, depending on where you live along the line. Long Island Railroad riders pay between $130 and $342 a month. But unless you get a subsidized parking place as a job perk (rare), it’s cheaper than driving. If you live in the city and take a subway to work, a 30-day unlimited ride Metrocard will cost you $78. For people in low-wage jobs that’s a lot. Yet the expense of operating these transit systems is higher than revenue. Subsidy is required.

Most of the nation’s wealth is generated in our cities, and most big cities couldn’t exist without some kind of mass transit system. It may be hard for a taxpayer in rural Nebraska to grasp that his life is better because of the Long Island Railroad, but it is. And now that the Age of Cheap Gasoline seems to be coming to an end, seems to me a lot of people who turned up their noses at mass transit in the past might want to change their attitudes.

Back where I grew up in the Ozarks, every weekday morning a great many cars carrying one passenger each head northeast highway 67 and then take highway 55 north into St. Louis, where the one passenger has a job. The drive takes an hour, give or take, assuming no bottlenecks form. And then, of course, in the evening they come back. This happens around every city in America. Now, I grew up in the Midwest and I realize everything is spread out there, and you need to drive to get anywhere you want to go. Manhattan may be the only place in America where people can function very happily without ever driving a car.

However, seems to me the day will come when fewer and fewer people will be able to afford to drive two hours a day between work and home. But how long will it take for conservatives to figure out that putting all of our tax dollars into highways while starving mass transit is, um, shortsighted?

Gassed

Billmon writes,

It’s a little disconcerting to think that gas prices — not Iraq, not Katrina, not the extra-constitutional power grabs — could decide whether Shrub’s presidency recovers or collapses into complete irrelevancy for the next three years. But the good Dr. Pollkatz has already plotted the relationship, and it’s statistically suggestive, to say the least.

It’s especially disconcerting when you consider that in 2000 the Bush campaign criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for its inability to lower gas prices.

Mr. Bush was critical of Al Gore in the 2000 campaign for being part of “the administration that’s been in charge” while the “price of gasoline has gone steadily upward.” In December 1999, in the first Republican primary debate, Mr. Bush said President Clinton “must jawbone OPEC members to lower prices.”

Katharine Q. Seelye wrote in the June 22, 2000 New York Times — “Price of Gasoline Emerges as Issue in Bush-Gore Race” —

Mr. Bush and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame the gas-price increase on the Clinton administration, saying the administration has had no coherent domestic energy policy and, in imposing regulations to meet clean air standards, had allowed prices to drift as high as $2.39 a gallon in the Midwest. Mr. Bush also said the administration had failed to persuade the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to ”open the spigots” to increase the supply.

After an announcement that the Federal Trade Commission would be investigating possible price gouging, Vice President Gore’s campaign made a point of connecting Governor Bush to Big Oil.

Senator Harkin, speaking on behalf of the Gore campaign on a conference call with reporters, accused the oil companies of ”outright thievery.” He went on to castigate Mr. Bush for his ”silence” on the matter, saying, ”What can you expect of someone who once claimed, and I quote, ‘There’s no such thing as being too closely aligned to the oil business in West Texas’?”

The quotation from Mr. Bush was made in a 1978 Congressional campaign. Acknowledging that the quotation was more than 20 years old, Mr. Harkin said: ”The point is, the test of character and leadership is when you’re willing to take on your friends when it’s in the nation’s best interest.”

Mr. Bush signed an emergency tax bill in 1999 that gave state tax breaks to oil and gas companies. The Dallas Morning News reported that the bill saved Richard Rainwater, a former Bush business partner, $1 million. At least 14 of Mr. Bush’s ”Pioneers,” his largest financial contributors, have ties to the oil industry.

Mr. Bush’s campaign has received $1.5 million from energy interests as of April 30, while Mr. Gore had received less than $125,000 as of the same date.

It seems some voters made the connection but believed Bush’s connections to Big Oil would help him pull prices down. From a blogger’s election 2000 notes

I got a big piece of this analysis from thinking about a comment from an AR relative, who said she voted for Bush because she thought that Bush would keep gas prices lower, and that mattered a lot. This was counterintuitive to me: the US oil industry (Bush’s home turf) lives and dies on gas prices, and the higher the better. One could even argue that Bush pere conspired with the Saudis to keep Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq in order to keep Iraq’s oil off the market, to keep Iraq from depressing the market.

If it’s Tuesday, it’s time for new record low Bush approval ratings. Georgia10 writes,

So President Bush woke up today and suddenly gave a damn about gas prices. Mr. 32% spent this morning calling for a investigation into possible cheating, price gouging or illegal manipulation in the gasoline markets. He also will asked the EPA to ease clean air restrictions, and he temporarily stopped deposits into the strategic petroleum reserve, a move that will have only a “negligible” impact on gas prices. The media are lapping it up, but they refuse to mention that Bush is forced to face the consequences of his own failed energy policy.

Taylor Marsh:

This is the most preposterous story I’ve read recently. Bush is going after his own people, the ones who helped get him elected. He’s going after the very men and companies that have led to this situation. First, Bush allows private meetings with oil companies and others, including people representing nuclear, so they can help craft our energy policy. Republicans give subsidies to companies that don’t need it. All the while President Bush doesn’t do a thing to help mitigate our independence, believing only ANWAR is the answer. If it isn’t drilling it doesn’t have a place in Bush’s world. We’ve also got Frist and Hastert planning to look into the oil companies. There’s only one reason they’re doing this and it’s because there’s an election. They’re trying to save themselves. The don’t want solutions or they would have been working on one long before now. Bush has been in office for years. What, he’s now just discovering we have an energy problem? This is a charade.

Besides, if Bush wants to know if price gouging is going on why doesn’t he just pick up the phone? Republicans know these guys, the oil men. They are one of their own. Don’t go through this political dance. Just go to the men who brought you to Washington and ask them. It’s not like they wouldn’t take Bush’s call.

I ‘spect it’s the same reason he didn’t try real hard to look into the Valerie Plame leak — he doesn’t really want to know.

Back to Georgia10:

Where has the President been for the last three years or so, as we’ve seen gas prices skyrocket? First, he promised the Iraq War would lower gas prices. As his senior economic adviser stated in 2002:

    “The key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil,” which would drive down oil prices, giving the U.S. economy an added boost.

It turns out that the Iraq War didn’t increase world oil, only oil profits. So, then, President Bush promised that his energy policy (which included massive tax breaks for the oil industry) would help our energy crisis. Well, it did not help, but that result is to be expected when our nation’s energy policy is drafted by the oil industry.

So where has the President been? Obviously, his administration does not shoulder all of the blame for high gas prices. But his deliberate absence and incompetence on this issue have only made the situation worse.

Now that the issue finally has his attention, he realized this would be a great time to suspend environmental rules for oil refiners. Typical. And he’s making more noise about our “addiction to oil,” although I haven’t noticed he’s come up with any concrete program to ween us of our addiction.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has proposed that federal gas taxes be eliminated for 60 days. This would reduce the price of gas by more than 18 cents a gallon. Democrats propose cutting six billion dollars in tax breaks to oil firms to make up the lost revenue. Currently, the money from the federal gas tax goes to the Highway Trust fund.

Of course, what we really need to do is get serious about alternate energy sources and put more money into mass transit — the sort of thing Al Gore was talking about many years ago. But you know how it is — conservation and solar energy are for sissies. Real men drill.

Gulag Politics

Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff report for Newsweek that Mary McCarthy “has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe.” Further,

McCarthy’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternoon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and “didn’t even have access to the information” in The Washington Post story in question.

Larry Johnson had said as much on his blog a couple of days ago:

In fact, there are some things about the case that puzzle me. For starters, Mary never worked on the Operations side of the house. In other words, she never worked a job where she would have had first hand operational knowledge about secret prisons. She worked the analytical side of the CIA and served with the National Intelligence Council. According to press reports, she subsequently worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2001 thru 2005. That is a type of academic/policy wonk position and, again, would not put her in a position to know anything first hand about secret prisons.

According to Hosenball and Isikoff, “McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter. … McCarthy has known Priest for some time. … the CIA was not necessarily accusing her of being the principal, original, or sole leaker of any particular story.” (Emphasis added.)

It is possible, then, that McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with the secret prison story. In fact, Hosenball and Isikoff report, other journalists reporting on this story say they got most of their information from unclassified sources.

Glenn Greenwald
: “Priest’s original story itself made clear said that her reporting was based upon ‘current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources.'”

When she was fired, McCarthy was told her identity would be protected. The next day it was all over the news.

Keeping in mind that everything we say is speculative … Steve M. writes,

I find myself thinking about this recent Molly Ivins column:

    …[Karl] Rove, as all the world knows, has been a longtime Republican political operative in Texas prior to heading to Washington with Bush. During that time, Texas Democrats noticed a pattern that they eventually became somewhat paranoid about: In election years, there always seemed to be an FBI investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press.

    After the election was over, the allegations often vanished….

Ivins goes on to note that one particular FBI agent seemed to be Rove’s go-to guy back in Texas. Now, though, Rove has the whole federal government to play with — he doesn’t need just one pal.

If the accusations against McCarthy turn out to be one of Karl’s red herrings, this could come back to bite him, big time.

Naturally, righties are still howling for McCarthy’s blood. The rightie blog Hot Air provides a handy-dandy roundup of rightie groupthink regarding McCarthy and why the revelation proves that just about every Democrat on the planet must be guilty of something. This paragraph in particular caught my attention:

And man, did she [McCarthy] ever get caught. WaPo says she failed multiple polygraphs before confessing. AJ Strata cites reports describing a “pattern of behavior”. But what’s really got right-wing bloggers exercised is the discovery that McCarthy and her husband have donated upwards of $10,000 to Democratic political campaigns and organizations since 2004. Curiously enough, certain mainstream media outlets have had trouble nailing down the exact figure despite the fact that Ace and Tom Maguire were able to find it on OpenSecrets.org in about thirty seconds. And that’s not the only convenient omission from their predictably sympathetic coverage. Sweetness & Light looks at two of the press’s go-to guys on this story – former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson – and reveals a few salient facts about their views on intelligence that somehow have managed to fly under the media’s radar.

I doubt the “certain media outlets” weren’t able to find the amount of money McCarthy and her husband donated to Democrats. Rather, to someone who’s not a blazing-hot partisan the information is not particularly significant, especially before McCarthy has actually been convicted of anything. No rational person would jump to the conclusion that someone in McCarthy’s position would risk arrest and tarnish a many-years-long career over mere party politics. And, of course, the “salient facts” about Johnson and McGovern are that they’ve spoken out against the Bush Administration’s deceitful manipulation of intelligence. In RightieWorld only other righties are allowed to be “go-to guys.”

Speaking of Larry Johnson, he writes in “Between Conscience and Unconscionable“:

And what have we learned this week? If you have contributed any money to Democrats you are a traitor if you criticize the President. Rand Beers, a senior national security advisor who served in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations was labeled a turncoat. Joe and Valerie Wilson? Guilty because they had the temerity to participate in politics and contribute to Al Gore (although they also contributed to George Bush senior). Mary McCarthy? Guilty as well for contributing to John Kerry. Of course, we can conveniently forget that she stood up to the Clinton Administration for its unjustified bombing of a factory in Sudan. Why worry about facts? Bush finds them convenient to ignore.

What we are witnessing is a political purge of the CIA. The Bush Administration is working to expel and isolate any intelligence officer who does not toe the line and profess allegiance to George. It is no longer about protecting and defending the Constitution. No. It is about protecting the indefensible reputation of George Bush.

The firing of Mary McCarthy and her trial in the media is a travesty. Particularly when George Bush continues to harbor leakers who put selfish political motives above the welfare of this nation. It remains to be seen if Mary McCarthy had anything to do with the leak of secret prisons. There is no doubt, however, that Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, Dick Cheney, and George Bush directly participated in a campaign to leak misleading intelligence information to the American people. Patrick Fitzgerald’s court filings make that point abundantly clear. Under George Bush, America is being asked to tolerate Gulag Politics. That is something I find intolerable and unconscionable.

See also:

Glenn Greenwald: “A Political Movement Built on Rage

Digby: “Agitating for a Crackdown

Taylor Marsh: “McCarthy as CIA Scapegoat