There is no free ride. President Obama is talking up electric cars, and Vice President Biden is emceeing events showcasing factories that will produce them. But to understand the economics that will move people in this century’s urban centers to their needful places, get an earful from New York Lieutenant Governor Dick Ravitch.
Ravitch, who rescued the New York City subway system in the 1980s, hardly looks like a Buzz Lightyear-esque envoy to the future. But decades of handling the people’s work embolden him to tell the truth about what the future costs. Rearing back in an easy chair at a forum this morning at NYU’s Wagner School for Public Service, he laid it flat: to get day laborers, doctors, dignitaries and developers to productive places requires major capital investment in mass transit. And it requires a dedicated public fund to pay for that transit. This fund is called a tax.
Everything Ravitch said carried political freight: he’s now a loyal lieutenant to an embattled governor trying to close a huge budget deficit. But one anecdote he served captures how limp and myopic the arguments about growing without taxing transportation really are. It goes like this:
“Why do politicians think a gas tax is toxic? In 1979, Jimmy Carter proposed a four-cent/gallon tax. It never made it out of committee in a Democratic-controlled Congress. The next year we elected a president on an antitax platform, and he proposed a five cent/gallon tax, a penny of which went to mass transit. Unprecedented!And it went through Congress like a knife goes through butter.
“I was chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authiority at the time, and went to DC for the signing ceremony. A reporter said: Mr President, you promised no new taxes. Reagan turned to him and said: this isn’t a tax, it’s a user charge. And that was the end of it!“
Ravitch’s point is that government serves the economy more fully if it uses its awesome bonding power to pay for everybody’s ride. If the private sector has to fund transportation, it also has to make money from transportation- freezing out poor people who do service work or revitalize communities.
“If you presume there’s a private solution for transportation, you assume the government wouldn’t limit the fares,” he said this morning. “If creditworthiness is constant across funding sources, wouldn’t you rather finance a new capital project tax-free? “
One can, of course, find local governments condemning land for private contractors who set up speedier toll roads. Ravitch is keeping his eyes on a more important principle. “Eminent domain for an alternate speedway is fine, but it has nothing to do with the fact that we have 150 million more people coming to urban corridors. How the hell are we going to move them?”
Reagan, wherever he’s flitting around these days, knows the answer.
