It’s been 7 years since Congress passed the last federal highway bill. Now it’s racing through Congress at the speed of light — why? Because they want to sell-off our public roads to private corporations, raise your taxes through tolls, and lift the ban on imposing tolls on existing highways. There are 500 toll projects being contemplated in Texas alone!

An amendment to allow tolls on ALL existing interstates in all 50 states is expected to be presented on the floor by Senator Carper of Delaware. Imposing tolls on existing freeways is a massive DOUBLE TAX — charging motorists an additional tax, a toll, to use what they’ve already built and paid for! 

The current House Bill, HR 7, only bans tolls on existing FEDERAL interstates. It GUTS the ban on imposing tolls on existing STATE highways — a ban that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison put in place for Texas since 2007.  The fate our public freeway system is under attack!

Sneaky new tax

Government has figured out that instead of solving congestion, they can manipulate it for a profit (by keeping your free lanes congested and forcing people to pay a premium to get mobility). They’re terrified to raise the gas tax, but have no problem imposing tolls on all new capacity to our roads, even on EXISTING lanes that we travel today without tolls. 

It costs 1-2 cents per mile to travel a gas tax funded freeway, but anywhere from 20 cents a mile up to 75 cents per mile to use a toll lane. It’s an explosion in our cost to travel. A gas tax funded road costs PENNIES a day, a toll road costs DOLLARS a day and THOUSANDS more in new taxes per year.

The way toll roads are being financed today, ALL Americans are paying to build them through subsidies of taxpayer money like gas tax, but you won’t be able to use them without paying a toll, too (a DOUBLE TAX)! So whether you can afford to take these toll lanes or not, you’re paying for them. This notion that tolls are user fees is a myth when you look at how heavily they’re subsidized by ALL taxpayers. You’re also paying for them through a higher cost of goods that gets passed onto consumers.

Selling us out 

Both the House and Senate versions of the federal highway bill, dubbed theAmerican Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, include public private partnerships (or PPPs) that sell-off our public roads to private corporations in 50-99 year government-sanctioned toll road monopolies. PPPs use heaps of public money to socialize the losses, while they privatize and GUARANTEEprofits for the private operators.

Columnist Michelle Malkin calls PPPs ‘corporate welfare.’ Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were some of the first PPPs and eventually caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent $1 trillion dollar taxpayer BAILOUT!

The TIFIA loan program is a HUGE source of funds used to subsidize ill-conceived toll roads that can’t pay for themselves. It’s the primary pot of taxpayer money given to these private, foreign corporations seeking to takeover our U.S. highways using public private partnership toll road contracts. 

NOTE: The first TIFIA loan was awarded to a private consortium in a PPP deal on the South Bay Expressway in San Diego. It went bankrupt less than three years later due to traffic projections that were off by over 40,000 cars per day! Taxpayers had to accept a write-down of nearly $80 million of a $172 million federal TIFIA loan in yet another taxpayer bailout for private corporations.

The TIFIA loan program is all BORROWED money from the Federal Reserve, so who will have to bailout these toll roads when the cars don’t show up as they didn’t in San Diego along with other projects across the country? YOU and me, the taxpayer. 

Think about it - PPPs give private corporations the power to TAX! They are granted the power to levy unlimited toll taxes on the traveling public – and we can’t hold corporations accountable like we can politicians at the ballot box. This is why politicians LOVE PPPs. They get to OUTSOURCE the taxationto their special interest buddies and makes us pay back our own money with interest through tolls!

Rather than get rid of the failed TIFIA loan program, the federal highway billINCREASES TIFIA funding by nearly TEN times from $100/yr to $1 BILLION/yr. Current law requires the taxpayers to be paid back first, now in the bill as written, private interests would get paid back first and taxpayers would be paid back last. 

PPPs also contain non-compete clauses that prohibit or penalize the expansion of free roads surrounding the privatized toll roads, guaranteeing congestion on the free routes. 

Also, PPP toll contracts allow private entities to benefit from he use ofeminent domain, and they result in toll rates as high as 75 cents a mile. That’s like adding $15 to every gallon of gas you buy!

URGENT ACTION ITEM

STEP 1 - 
Call Senator John Cornyn and ask him to support the Hutchison  ban on tolling existing STATE and FEDERAL freeways and to STRIP PPPs & TIFIA loans OUT of the transportation bill .

Call Cornyn’s office at 202-224-2934 & email him here.

STEP 2 - 

Call your member of Congress and ask him/her to ADD the Hutchison “Freedom from Tolls” Amendment to ban tolling existing freeways - BOTH state and federal - to HR 7 andSTRIP PPPs & TIFIA loans OUT of the transportation bill.

Find out who your member of Congress is here or call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

President Obama’s speech to Congress on Thursday was well delivered, but it lacked something.  That something was ideas.

The unemployment rate has been consistently over 9% for better than two years.  As the 2012 election approaches, the Obama Administration is becoming worried that the sluggish economy will be detrimental to the possibility of a second term.  Even folks inside the beltway are becoming increasingly aware that good ideas are not to be found in Washington.

When this Great Recession started, jobs were being lost at the rate of 100,000 a month and most economists were alarmed.  Now more than three years into this mess, there are more than 16,000,000 people are out of work or underemployed.  The answers to solve this problem may not be clear, but the question is:  how do we get these people back to work?

Looking at history can give us a clue as to how to spend borrowed money.  In the first century A.D., Caesar Augustus ruled Rome, and for more than forty years he built roads, aqueducts and port facilities.  These facilities lasted hundreds of years and provided for increased commerce making Rome the trading center of the world.  These were big ideas.  In the twentieth century, during the Great Depression, money was borrowed to build the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, and even the San Antonio River Walk.  All of these projects have provided for commerce and jobs for generations.  There are no big ideas like these coming from the Washington these days.

According to the Dow Jones Index, there are basically three sectors of the economy:  the industrial sector, the transportation sector, and the utility sector.  The transportation sector of the economy could easily be invigorated with twenty-first century ideas.  One example that should be considered is a coast-to-coast MagLev Rail system—literally a train suspended by magnetic fields that can reach speeds of 250 miles per hour or more.  This would transport goods across the continent at near-Internet speeds.

The utility sector of the economy could be revitalized with desalination projects designed to purify subterranean brine water for agriculture and industry.  Electrical transmission lines could be strung to the wind belt and solar belt for the transportation of renewable energy.  These projects will create jobs and provide for future commerce.  The financial model for all of these projects could be identical to the model that built the “Chunnel” from Great Britain to France, which was a cooperative public/private success back in the 1980s.  Most of the money to fund these extraordinary projects was from share holders and banks; the role of government was to see that there were no obstacles.

So what has Washington done:  “cash for clunkers” and “shovel ready projects” that have produced no tangible results.  “Shovel ready?” In this administration that’s for a deeper hole to bury all that government spending!

Tune in to The Boiling Point radio show, Saturday mornings, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM,  on 92.5 FM, the Patriot, in San Antonio, available live, streaming or by podcast.

People will often use superlatives without quantification: “he’s the worst” or “she’s the best.”  Listeners are often forced to take these statements by faith or challenge the speaker to show the numbers.  Exactly what is it that is behind those statements?  So it is when we voice alarm that President Obama is bringing down the Nation.  So how do we respond when our liberal friends challenge us to back up those statements with facts?

Michael J. Boskin, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, recently came to our aid.  In his September 8th article published in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Boskin states that while “the president constantly reminds us that he was dealt a difficult hand…the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly.  To read his entire article visit the Hoover Institution’s Daily Report.

The Wall Street Journal helpfully summarized the data as follows: