The American Spectator

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Do they, in their private lives, take this same approach? Do they ignore frugality on food and clothing while worrying only about the mortgage and car payment?

Personally, I prefer the broken windows approach to saving federal money. If we can wean lawmakers from attempting to buy votes with questionable expenditures of minor sums, perhaps it will someday be easier to get them to look at entitlements more realistically. In other words, if we can encourage a small-scale habit of parsimony, we might ultimately get them to stop buying votes wholesale through spending trillions on programs that are difficult to rein in.

p>"Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" is an old saying but one that still has some merit, even today when the pennies are counted in quadrillions. br> -- Richard Donley br> New Lyme, Ohio /p>

The problem with the transportation pork is that it bypasses processes that could sort out the difference between a good road project and a bad road project. Theoretically, the difference between a good project and a bad transportation project is the difference between consumptive spending and productive spending. Nationwide, transportation departments have been doing a terrible job of making such decisions anyway, so I can see how someone might come up with the idea that a congressman or senator could not possibly do worse. This however is not an adequate justification for wasting taxpayer money. The current system works a little like this: They build the road and then we try to adjust to the damage or mistakes.

The process of transportation project selection, nationwide is awful. In the Sixties there were benefit cost formulas that allegedly took into consideration the value of human life, the cost of accidents with and without human injury and many other factors. This formula changed over time in such a way that it began to include a very high fraction of intangible and questionable benefits. If the formula worked then, over time, there would be a decline in highway deaths, damage and general economic chaos. That did not happen. most declines in fatalities are attributable to safety improvements in the engineering of the vehicle, not project location.

In fact, there is a decline in rate of return on transportation investment since the construction of the Interstate. Proof that the benefit formulas failed is this: The cost of financing the car and insuring the car went up faster than the consumer price index while the cost of gasoline and the cost of a new car, when inflation adjusted since 1980, actually went down slightly. (That may not be true for California or Arizona any more)

p>Being frustrated with the difficulty in transforming pavement into economic advantage, our senators and congressmen have seized the opportunity to turn pavement into votes or as constituent service. This is malpractice of traffic engineering by people whose real job is fundraising to get elected next time around. We can build a road anywhere but we have no good system of selecting projects that derives the greatest good for the greatest number. We don't even have a good definition of need. This system tramples property rights in that it gives the government the right to take property without there being a clear understanding of the magnitude of public benefit. No property, public or private should be taken for a remote possibility of public benefit. No taxpayers money should be taken if it is to be used to build a road that costs more than the actual benefit conferred on society, especially if it ends up as an overnight sleeping place for dogs. br> -- Danny L. Newton br> Cookeville, Tennessee /p>

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