Tom Friedman has an idea for what Republican candidates should be asked Thursday night that will apparently reveal them for the lunatics they are. His idea:
If I got to ask one question of the presidential aspirants at Thursday’s Fox Republican debate, it would be this: “As part of a 1982 transportation bill, President Ronald Reagan agreed to boost the then 4centagallon gasoline tax to 9 cents, saying, ‘When we first built our highways, we paid for them with a gas tax,’ adding, ‘It was a fair concept then, and it is today.’ Do you believe Reagan was right then, and would you agree to raise the gasoline tax by 5 cents a gallon today so we can pay for our highway bill, which is now stalled in Congress over funding?”
The gasoline tax is currently 18.4 cents a gallon, and was last hiked by Bill Clinton in 1993, after a raise by George Bush in 1990. Average gasoline prices have fallen roughly a dollar a gallon in the last year, so a 5 cent increase would hardly be noticed. No matter, the Senate last week passed a six year transportation bill, but funded it for only three years. And because Senate Republicans refused to pay for any of it with a gas tax, they raise the funds instead, in part, by selling oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is our insurance against another oil crisis. I’m not making this up.
House Republicans have yet to weigh in. Perhaps they’ll propose paying for it by selling gold from Fort Knox or paintings from the National Gallery.
Why is this such a key question? Because it cuts to the core of what is undermining the Republican Party today and, indirectly, our country: There is no longer a Republican center right that would have no problem raising the gas tax for something as fundamental as infrastructure. Sure, there are center-right candidates — like Jeb Bush and John Kasich. But can they run, win and govern from the center-right when the base of their party and so many of its billionaire donors reflect the angry anti-science, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-minorities, anti-gay rights and anti-immigration views of the Tea Party and its media enforcer, Fox News?
I can tell you what John Kasich and Jeb Bush — and everyone to their right — would and should say to his gas-tax proposal: Absolutely not.
Friedman’s thesis here is that if Republicans won’t agree to keep funding a 50-year-old transportation system in exactly the way it was first funded 50 years ago, they’re irresponsible. This is ridiculous. I don’t like how people like Friedman fetishize a “grand bargain” of tax increases and spending cuts either, but at least it has a veneer of being forward-thinking — this is just sheer laziness.
Now, does the U.S. need to spend some money on its roads? Sure. And is the way Republicans and Democrats in the Senate proposed to do so over the next six years ridiculous? Sure.
But Friedman’s suggestion, that the only reasonable way to build and maintain infrastructure is to do it the way Ike decided we should, is totally unreasonable — the gas tax and the federal highway system aren’t just imperfect policies, they’re bad policies. The best case for Friedman’s demand for a gas-tax hike is that it’s the simplest, most politically realistic way to pay for new highway spending. But that’s still questionable, and isn’t really his argument. He just says: You’re not serious if you don’t want to sustain a dysfunctional, overpriced system.
Gas taxes are a bad way to raise money for infrastructure, and funding highways — and bike paths and light rail and lots of other things, some of them staggeringly useless — with a federal levy, with many decisions made at the federal level, is just not a good idea. It’s not how economists think transportation should be planned or funded; allowing it to atrophy is not some kind of rabid small-government anti-science hysteria. It is, perhaps, unwise if opponents don’t also offer an alternative, but at least one proposal is already floating around Congress for how to send these decisions, and their funding, back to the state and local level. So, “absolutely not” is a perfectly good answer by itself, but there is an even better one: “Absolutely not, and I have a much better idea.”
People like Friedman are enamored of the idea that our nation’s serious people, the adults in the room, tend to be centrists. His insistence that people endorse a dumb idea like this is a perfect example of how centrist scolds can turn out to be the lazy, unserious ones themselves.