Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, for the first time since last week.
The number one British single today in 1967 was written by Charlie Chaplin:
Today in 1974, members of Emerson, Lake and Palmer were arrested for swimming naked in a Salt Lake City hotel pool. They were fined $75 each.
At least 17 people were dead after a 19-year-old former student opened fire at a South Florida high school on Wednesday afternoon, officials said.
The suspect was identified as Nikolaus Cruz, a former student who had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland for disciplinary reasons, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. He said at least 14 other people were injured in addition to the 17 people killed.
The Washington Post adds:
He had been getting treatment at a mental health clinic and then stopped. He was expelled from school for discipline problems. Many of his acquaintances had cut ties in part because of his strange Instagram posts and reports that he liked shooting animals. His father died a few years ago. His mother, reportedly the only person with whom he was close, died around Thanksgiving.
Finally, Nikolas Cruz, 19, had a fascination with guns. …
“Weird” was the word students had used for Cruz since middle school. And he seemed to only be getting weirder, they said.
At first “it was nothing alarming,” said Dakota Mutchler, who went to middle school with Cruz. There was something “a little off about him,” said the 17-year-old, but that was it — for a while.
Then, as Cruz transitioned into high school, he “started progressively getting a little more weird,” Mutchler told The Washington Post. Cruz, he said, was selling knives out of a lunchbox, posting on Instagram about guns and killing animals, and eventually “going after one of my friends, threatening her.” …
Neighbors told the [Fort Lauderdale] Sun-Sentinel that police were called out repeatedly to deal with complaints about Cruz. Shelby Speno said he was seen shooting at chickens owned by a resident. Malcolm Roxburgh told the Sun-Sentinel that Cruz took a dislike to the pigs kept as pets by another family. “He sent over his dog … to try to attack them.” …
Years earlier and in recent months, however, young people acquainted with Cruz, like Mutchler, had seen enough to disturb them.
Joshua Charo, 16, a former classmate during their freshman year, told the Miami Herald that all Cruz would “talk about is guns, knives and hunting.” While Charo said Cruz joined the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps as a freshman, he continued to be “into some weird stuff,” like shooting rats with a BB gun.
Drew Fairchild, also a classmate during Cruz’s freshman year, agreed. “He used to have weird, random outbursts,” he told the Herald, “cursing at teachers. He was a troubled kid.”
He was suspended from Stoneman Douglas for fighting, Charo told the Herald, and because he was found with bullets in his backpack. …
An Instagram account that appeared to belong to the suspect showed several photos of guns. And one appeared to show a gun’s holographic laser sight pointed at a neighborhood street. A second showed at least six rifles and handguns laid out on a bed with the caption “arsenal.” Other pictures showed a box of large-caliber rounds with the caption “cost me $30.” One of the most disturbing appeared to show a dead frog’s bloodied corpse. Most of the photos were posted July 2017.
About this and every mass shooting, read this and this.
The other obscenity of this week happened in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass:
Of the many things Chicago should sear into its memory from Tuesday, one was this:
That long procession of police cars, blue lights flashing, trailing the ambulance carrying the body of Chicago police Cmdr. Paul Bauer from Northwestern Memorial Hospital to the morgue.
Chicago is a city of pain.
Dozens and dozens of squad vehicles joined the procession, and dozens of police officers stood to the side and saluted as the procession passed, and more mounted police units lined up and saluted in the darkening late afternoon.
The police were there for the commander, one of their own.
City Hall will tell you that downtown Chicago is safe and that yes, things happen, but if you think of it in terms of statistics, it’s safe.
But what happened downtown Tuesday, at the Thompson Center — just across the street from Chicago’s City Hall — is just the kind of thing that shakes people’s sense of safety.
Chicago police commanders aren’t supposed to be shot to death, not there, not at the heart of city business and politics.
Gunfire isn’t supposed to happen just a stone’s throw from City Hall. But it happened, and passers-by were frightened and they screamed and heard shouting and a few saw the blood.
Bauer, 53, husband and father, a 31-year-veteran of the Chicago Police Department and commander of the Near North District, was shot while confronting a robbery suspect.
Now comes the politics, the finger-pointing, and the political angles taken to benefit one side or another, none of them benefiting the police. Included on this list will be the suspect’s criminal record, whether he was treated leniently, how he got the gun. All of it will come out.
But right now I’m thinking of the cops, like one I talked to just as the news about Bauer was breaking. I’ll call him Joe.
Retired now, he spent his life as the real police — meaning he wasn’t a politician or some house cat or a climber connected to an alderman. He put his hands on people, making arrests in Chicago.
He has two sons on the police force and the boys are in action spots, not soft spots. They’re not guarding City Hall.
“We’re just sitting here all together, just watching the news, and I keep telling them to be careful, that you never know, that any day something like this can happen” Joe said. “I always wonder if it sinks in. You know they understand, but do they get it? Or do they think it won’t happen to them?”
The rest of us who don’t know the life, we look at police as men and women who make arrests, the people who put muscle behind the laws, or as human actors leveraged in political dramas about excessive police force.
But it wouldn’t hurt us to think of them as somebody’s son or daughter, because they are that, too.
“All I want is for my sons to come home after their shift,” said Joe. “Do people ever think of that? They say they think of it, and they’re thinking of it now, but do they really think it, say a month from now? I think of it.”
Another thing Chicago might want to remember on this day of pain was the police radio chatter, reported in the papers, when the suspect was being chased downtown.
“Don’t anybody get hurt,” warned an officer chasing the suspect. “We just wanted to do a street stop on him and he took off on me.”
Don’t anybody get hurt.
That was downtown. That wasn’t on the West Side or South Side.
So the suspect ran and Bauer, who had heard the call on his radio, recognized him and ran after him.
And not long after that, the commander was dead.
Choking back tears, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson walked to the microphones, cops behind him, and made a statement.
“Cmdr. Bauer was shot multiple times,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, Cmdr. Bauer passed away. The offender is in custody. The weapon is recovered. I just ask the citizens of this city to keep the Bauer family in their prayers. I’ve been meeting with his wife and daughter. It is a difficult day for us. But we’ll get through it.”
In order to live our lives, we choose to become numb to almost everything. We become numb to Chicago’s river of violence that for years has been claiming so many lives in the gang wars. We’re become numb to the bleating of politicians with no answers.
We’ve become numb to all of it.
That’s what happens in a city of pain. You grow numb.
About Bauer and his killer, the Tribune’s Annie Sweeney reports:
Just four months ago, Chicago police Cmdr. Paul Bauer didn’t mince words when he spoke about his frustrations that career offenders weren’t facing stiffer consequences in court.
“We’re not talking about the guy that stole a loaf of bread from the store to feed his family,” Bauer told the Loop North News. “We’re talking about career robbers, burglars, drug dealers. These are all crimes against the community. They need to be off the street.”
He took exception to Cook County’s push to set more affordable bails for defendants as part of an effort to reduce the population in the jail.
“Maybe I’m jaded,” he said. “But I don’t think that is anything to be proud of.”
On Tuesday, Bauer was fatally shot in the Loop by a four-time felon who had drawn the suspicion of tactical teams in the busy downtown area, police said. Officers tried to stop the man a few blocks from the Thompson Center, but he took off running, according to radio traffic of the incident.
Bauer encountered him at the Thompson Center, where a physical struggle resulted at a stairwell outside the government building, Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. Bauer was found by other officers. The suspect was taken into custody.
As a four-time felon Bauer’s alleged shooter committed another crime by possessing a gun. And neither he nor Cruz should have been out on the streets.
David Blaska, formerly of The C(r)apital Times:
Any day now, the nicest guy in the world, Capital Times emeritus editor Dave Zweifel, will write a paean to a kinder and gentler politics, civil discourse, and the Chicago Cubs. Until then, his newspaper is talking more trash than Donald Trump on a tweet storm.
Their new name for their arch-nemesis is “Crooked Scott Walker.” Tit for tat, you Hillary haters!
In service of the nine or 20 Democrats running to replace Walker (we include “Cross Plains Woman”), The Capital Timesbad mouths the governor’s proposed, one-time $100 tax rebate to parents and his one-week sales tax holiday. Fair enough. The white lab coats at the Policy Werkes happen to agree that tax one-offs are bad policy.
But Dane County’s Progressive Voice is so unhinged that whatever thread of reason finds its way into its editorials gets drowned out by carpet-chewing, partisan bile. The following passage, as one example, goes beyond hyperbole into spittle-flecked hate:
Wisconsin’s governor is never going to do right by working families because he doesn’t serve them; he serves his campaign donors. The Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other out-of-state millionaires have paid for his political viability since he emerged as a statewide political figure. The only flexibility that Walker’s masters permit him is at election time, when the career politician is allowed to tinker with sales taxes in order to try to win a few votes.
“Walker’s masters!” What a hoot! That’s right, Scott Walker is really a Derail the Jail social justice warrior who made a Faustian bargain with the sulfurous Koch boys and is now trapped in their web.
“Never do right by working families?” Hey, working families, how do you like:
- University tuition frozen six straight years
- Property taxes reduced to the lowest relative level since World War 2
- Income taxes on middle class families less than when Jim Doyle left office
- 3.0% unemployment, the lowest in 18 years
- Wage growth the 12th highest in the nation
- More funding for K-12 education than ever ($11.5 billion) — up $636 million
- Top 10 ratings among the states for high school graduation, quality of health care, and jobs for the disabled
- Wisconsin’s bond rating upgraded to Aa1 by Moody’s for the first time since 1973?
Regurgitating Democrat(ic) party talking points
Dane County’s Progressive Voice is a corporation that exercises its right to coordinate, collude and conspire with any politician or political party it favors without fear of pre-dawn visits from the speech police and their battering rams.
Their speech does not have to be truthful, accurate, or fair. That’s its First Amendment right. Whether it hurts or helps its own cause will come out in the wash this November. The best jury consists of the voters, who have elected Scott Walker three times in the last eight years and went for Trump in once-blue Wisconsin. (Ron Johnson over “career-politician” Russ Feingold, priceless.)
The Capital Times has been such a partisan attack dog — and rabid, at that — for so long it has forfeited any credibility. Who do they persuade who isn’t already convinced? In which case, their rants become mere pandering to their base, Segway Boy, Thistle, and Hippie Bongstocking among them.
You are correct, former colleagues, “Sales taxes ARE inherently unfair. They DO place a greater burden on working families than on the rich.” So Walker is trying to give those taxpayers a break. A break that The Capital Times opposes!
Never met a tax hike it didn’t like
Did The Capital Times opposing a sales tax when Democrat Gaylord Nelson instituted one in 1962? No it did not. When Democrat Tony Earl made the 5% state sales tax permanent? No it did not. When Dane County adopted a 0.5% county sales tax? No it did not.
A flat wheel tax could be said to unfairly place a greater burden on working families than the rich, given that the unemployed guy driving a beater pays the same $28 as the Tesla leaving the Madison Club. The Capital Times remained silent as the liberals, progressives, and socialists on the Dane County Board gave their assent last November.
The Progressives can name check the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson all they want but what does that really say? That Wisconsin voters — deplorable fools that they are — three times have been hoodwinked?
In case those voters are as stupid as The Capital Times thinks them, the Progressive Voice advises take them to take the rebate, anyway.
The C(r)apital Times is hypocritical anyway by failing to call for sales taxes on advertising. The C(r)apital Times could also call for sales taxes on single-copy newspaper sales, but that wouldn’t hurt them because the former daily newspaper is now given away once a week.
Today in 1961, singer Jackie Wilson got a visit from a female fan who demanded to see him, enforcing said demand with a gun. Wilson was shot when he tried to disarm the fan.
The number one album today in 1964 encouraged record-buyers to “Meet the Beatles!”
Amity Shlaes:
Free marketeers may sometimes win elections, but they are not winning U.S. history. In recent years, the consensus regarding the American past has slipped leftward, and then leftward again. No longer is American history a story of opportunity, or of military or domestic triumph. Ours has become, rather, a story of wrongs, racial and social. Today, any historical figure who failed at any time to support abolition, or, worse, took the Confederate side in the Civil War, must be expunged from history. Wrongs must be righted, and equality of result enforced.
The equality campaign spills over into a less obvious field, one that might otherwise provide a useful check upon the nonempirical claims of the humanities: economics. In a discipline that once showcased the power of markets, an axiom is taking hold: equal incomes lead to general prosperity and point toward utopia. Teachers, book review editors, and especially professors withhold any evidence to the contrary. Universities lead the shift, and the population follows. Today, millennials, those born between 1981 and 2000, outnumber baby boomers by the millions, and polls suggest that they support redistribution specifically, and government action generally, more than their predecessors do. A 2014 Reason/Rupe poll found 48 percent of millennials agreeing that government should “do more” to solve problems, whereas 37 percent said that government was doing “too many things.” A full 58 percent of the youngest of millennials, those 18–24 when surveyed, held a “positive” view of socialism, in dramatic contrast with their parents: only 23 percent of those aged 55 to 64 viewed socialism positively.
At least for now, most progressives acknowledge that markets and economic growth are necessary. But progressives in academia contend that growth has proved itself secondary to equality efforts—something to be exploited, rather than appreciated. Not just nationally, but worldwide, policymakers and the press regard the subordination of growth to equality to be a benign practice, as in the recent line in the Indian periodical Mint: a policy aimed at “reducing inequality need not hurt growth.”
The redistributionist impulse has brought to the fore metrics such as the Gini coefficient, named after the ur-redistributor, Corrado Gini, an Italian social scientist who developed an early statistical measure of income distribution a century ago. A society where a single plutocrat earns all the income ranks a pure “1” on the Gini scale; one in which all earnings are perfectly equally distributed, the old Scandinavian ideal, scores a “0” by the Gini test. The Gini Index has been renamed or updated numerous times, but the principle remains the same. Income distribution and redistribution seem so crucial to progressives that French economist Thomas Piketty built an international bestseller around it, the wildly lauded Capital.
Through Gini’s lens, we now rank past eras. Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings—the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson—score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say—the 1970s, say—simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.
But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.
Touring American history with an eye on growth, not equality, has become so unusual that doing so almost feels like driving on the wrong side of the road. Nonetheless, a review trip through the decades is useful because the evidence for growth is right there, in our own American past. Four decades, especially, warrant examination: the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1970s.
On Valentine’s Day, this song, tied to no anniversary or birthday I’m aware of, nonetheless seems appropriate:
The number one British single today in 1968 was written by Bob Dylan:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Motown Chartbusters Volume 3”:
The latest Donald Trump-generated outrage is his proposal for a military parade in Washington on Independence Day.
The rule, of course, for Republican presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan is that, according to liberals, they are either idiots or evil, hence two-thirds of this headline.
Choice number three is the opinion of Jake Novak:
President Donald Trump wants a parade, and it’s setting off yet another angry debate.
That’s because the president wants a military parade, reportedly inspired by the Bastille Day festivities he witnessed in Paris in July. That feeds into some persistent criticisms from the staunch anti-Trump side that he is a fascist looking to appeal to red state America’s nascent militarism.
Everybody calm down.
This parade actually makes sense in the most non-fascist and democratic terms possible. Unlike fascist regimes, Trump needs voter support. That sometimes means winning over new voters here and there. But the real imperative for an incumbent is to keep and acknowledge the voters who got you in office in the first place.
By contrast, the anti-Trump types triggered by this move sure seem like a lost cause. People jumping at the chance to frequently compare the president to Adolf Hitler aren’t going to be won over, anyway. But as they go before the more moderate public and show such an extreme opposition to a parade, they make Trump look much more reasonable in comparison.
Take a good look at the Bastille Day parade from last year, and it’s not hard to see why such an event appeals to Trump. That’s because the Bastille Day parade isn’t exactly like the Nazi or Soviet military parades of the past. The stars of the French parade aren’t the politicians or even the weapons, but the actual troops and military veterans. They dominate the parade route at every turn.
That’s the key to what makes copying such a spectacle such a positive for Trump. Polls show that America’s troops continue to be stronger supporters of this president than the public at large. U.S. military veterans are much more pro-Trump than almost any other group, with data showing they chose him over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election by a large 60 percent-to-34 percent margin.
There’s a geographic aspect to this as well. It’s not so much that blue state America doesn’t support the troops. The bigger issue is that most of blue state America seems to be generally disconnected from the military. The Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and New England regions where Trump tends to poll poorly send a significantly smaller portion of enlistees to the military than the national average. Trump strongholds in the South and rural America send a much higher proportion than the national average of their populations to the armed forces.
Active duty troops tell only part of the story. Veterans are more likely to support Trump than non-veterans and those still serving in the armed forces. It was those veterans in the key swing states who likely made the difference in the 2016 election for the Trump campaign.
Now the picture should be getting clearer: The Trump team wants to put his strongest and largest source of support in the spotlight and reward it with national attention on the July 4 holiday. It’s really a political no-brainer.
Of course, there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. Americans will be rightly spooked if the parade includes massive missiles and artillery rolling along Constitution Avenue. Tanks are probably okay, but only as long as there are troops visibly sticking out of them and being acknowledged as they are in the Bastille Day event.
But imagine a parade dominated by some of the elite military bands, Medal of Honor recipients marching together, and those awesome B-2 stealth bomber and F-35 fighter jet flyovers. These are the exact same kinds of imagery America rolls out during every Super Bowl Sunday, but all too briefly when you consider there are so many other troops and veterans who never get acknowledged on a stage anywhere near that big.
That imagery also works well for Trump. Appearing with the troops with big American flags providing the backdrop is almost never a negative for any president.
A famous story in veteran media circles proves that point. After then-CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl aired that was highly critical of President Ronald Reagan’s policies, top White House advisor Michael Deaver actually thanked Stahl because the video in the piece was dominated with Reagan standing proudly at patriotic events. Deaver said: “In the competition between the ear and the eye, the eye always wins.”
It’s that image of Trump as the ultimate cheerleader and defender of the troops and the military that seems to be working for him right now. Last month, he framed the government shutdown as the Democrats choosing the so-called “Dreamer” illegal immigrants over paying the troops. The polls seem to show the president won the shutdown battlethanks to that argument.
Now, he’s pushing support for the recent budget agreement in Congress solely on the argument that it boosts defense spending and helps the troops.
It seems more than a coincidence that this is also the time that the president’s support for a military parade leaks out to the news media. Trump can now take a page out of his shutdown strategy and make the point that the parade would really be a celebration of the troops and ask why any American would oppose that.
Trump knows he won the election largely due to active duty troops and veterans. That’s why this parade idea works for him and fighting and ridiculing it could be a dangerous trap for those who oppose him.
The number two single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
Tom Still knows more about Wisconsin business than those campaigning against Foxconn:
There are still plenty of people in Wisconsin who think the Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group is giving the state a giant head fake.
Skeptics think the company has no intention to put down roots in Wisconsin, and is simply waiting for the chance to abscond with our tax dollars and scamper home.
The latest company announcement rammed home the fact that nothing could be further from the truth.
Foxconn is buying a seven-story building in downtown Milwaukee from Northwestern Mutual, Wisconsin’s 161-year-old insurance giant. It will be the company’s North American headquarters and a center for activities outside its planned manufacturing plant in Racine County.
Those activities will include innovation, incubation, venture capital investment possibilities and other commercial dealings. The building has the capacity to hold 650 people and will be renamed Foxconn Place.
The move was praised by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and Gov. Scott Walker, who joined in the Feb. 5 announcement.
“Foxconn is putting a stake in the ground,” said Abele, once touted as a Democratic candidate for governor. “This is an extraordinary opportunity…”
At the same news conference, Foxconn executive Louis Woo pledged the company will “work for the next 161 years to not only witness but actively participate in the transformation and growth of Wisconsin.”
If that’s a head fake, it beats anything we just saw in the Super Bowl.
People may continue to debate whether Foxconn’s 13,000 direct jobs and its predicted supply-chain effects are worth the state tax credits, but they need to remember Foxconn won’t get those credits unless the company meets specific job and capital goals over time.
The contract between the state and Foxconn is tightly written, as it should be, and lays down job and capital investment markers over a 15-year schedule. It’s a “pay-as-you-grow” strategy that can throttle up or down depending on the company’s performance.
In the meantime, skeptics should at least acknowledge that Foxconn is working hard to be a permanent and active corporate citizen of Wisconsin.
It shows not only in the Milwaukee headquarters announcement, but in job fairs, research and development relationships, supply chain spadework, land acquisition, transportation planning and more across the state.
In Milwaukee, the Regional Talent Partnership organized through the Milwaukee 7 economic development group is trying to meet the area’s workforce attraction and retention demands – including those tied to Foxconn.
UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone is leading that partnership, which involves other universities and technical colleges. The group includes UW-Parkside and Gateway Technical College, which is knee-deep in Foxconn workforce planning in Racine and Kenosha counties. Mone will speak at the March 19 Wisconsin Tech Summit in Waukesha, where Foxconn representatives will meet with emerging companies.
Marquette University and the Milwaukee School of Engineering are examples of colleges where Foxconn representatives have met with students and faculty; MSOE has announced plans for a gift-funded $34 million computational science and artificial science center to keep up with growing talent and R&D demands.
The city of Milwaukee is examining the possibility of expanded Amtrak service in the Milwaukee-to-Chicago rail route, in part to accommodate anticipated Foxconn workers traffic from the city to Racine County and back.
Meanwhile, reconstruction of I-94 south of Milwaukee is set to begin in earnest in 2019.
The highway will be widened from six lanes to eight from College Avenue in Milwaukee south to Highway 142 in Kenosha County. Interchanges will be rebuilt, as will frontage roads between Highway 20 and Highway KR, the stretch of interstate closest to the planned Foxconn campus.
While it’s a bittersweet experience for many farmers in the Racine town of Mount Pleasant, Foxconn is paying about five times per acre — about $50,000 — what land sold for before the company decided to build there.
Many people still have their doubts about the size of the Foxconn deal and remain concerned about environmental effects. At this point, however, those who still believe Foxconn is giving a giant head fake are only faking themselves.
The specter of Wisconsin toll roads rears itself again in this Badger Institute news release:
The Badger Institute and the Reason Foundation said Thursday the state should pursue tolling and offered a solution to concerns expressed by Gov. Scott Walker.
“The stars seem to be aligned for Wisconsin to join the ranks of states deciding to rebuild and modernize their Interstate highways using the revenues from all-electronic tolling,” said Robert W. Poole Jr., director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation and author of the Badger Institute report Rebuilding and Modernizing Wisconsin’s Interstates with Toll Financing.
“Leaders in both houses of the Legislature representing both parties are favorable to the idea. The Trump Administration’s new infrastructure plan promises to remove federal restrictions on Interstate tolling and encourage states to use toll revenue to match new federal support.”
The Badger Institute has long advocated for toll roads. Leaders of the state Senate and Assembly have now embraced tolling as a long-term solution to Wisconsin’s road funding dilemma as well. Gov. Walker expressed concerns about effectively raising taxes on Wisconsin drivers, but Poole noted that Value-Added Tolling would alleviate that problem.
“Value-Added Tolling means only charging tolls once highway customers get improved infrastructure to use,” said Poole. “And it also means not charging both tolls and fuel taxes for the same stretch of roadway.”
For Wisconsin, that would mean the following:
- Implement electronic tolling to pay for rebuilding specific Interstates and interchanges;
- Begin tolling only after the new pavement and bridges are ready to open; and,
- Provide rebates of state fuel taxes to those who pay tolls in the rebuilt corridors.
“Rebates of fuel taxes are simple to calculate via the electronic tolling system,” Poole said. “This should satisfy Gov. Walker’s legitimate concerns about double-charging users.”
A policy study released today by the Reason Foundation ranked each state’s highway system by 11 different categories. Ranking the Best, Worst, Safest, and Most Expensive State Highway Systems — The 23rd Annual Highway Report gave Wisconsin an overall rank of 38th in highway performance and cost-effectiveness.
Badger Institute President Mike Nichols pointed out that there are no other realistic, long-term solutions to the state’s transportation dilemma.
“We need more revenue to prevent widespread deterioration of our roads,” said Nichols. “More debt is not the answer. Over 20 percent of all transportation fund revenues are already used for debt service rather than improving our roads. All told, we spend over half a billion per year just servicing transportation-related debt.”
“Raising gas taxes on everybody isn’t fair or logical either,” Nichols added. “Fuel-efficient cars already burn less gas and soon enough – when the price of electric vehicles plummets – many of us won’t be buying much gas at all. We need to wean ourselves off gas taxes, not increase them.
“All-electronic tolling is a free-market, logical, fair, modern solution. No toll plazas. No toll booths. No lines. Just better roads that get us to our jobs and back home to our families on time.”
Poole also noted that the national board of AAA (America’s largest highway user group) has endorsed Value-Added Tolling, and should be supportive of such an effort in Wisconsin.
Poole participated in a Badger Institute webinar last year on the topic of Interstate Tolling for Wisconsin: Why and How? The webinar, Poole’s slide presentation and other tolling resources can be found here.
All of that flies in the face of other states’ toll experiences. The number of states that have former toll roads that became non-toll roads can be counted on one hand. The actual history is that once toll roads are established, they never go away. The Illinois Tollway Authority is one of the most corrupt features of the corrupt state of Illinois.
That’s one prediction. Another is that drivers will refamiliarize themselves with whatever the parallel road is to the new toll road — U.S. 18 between Madison and Milwaukee, U.S. 12 from the Dells northward, Wisconsin 16 from Tomah to La Crosse, and so on. They will be inconvenienced by slower traffic and driving through towns, but they won’t have to pay tolls.
The proposal includes a fuel tax rebate presumably to address Walker’s wish for this to be revenue-neutral, except that it would take revenues away from fuel taxes that pay for other road work. Ask the road lobby, and it will claim that the bigger issue isn’t Interstate projects, but local roads.
What has not been considered by anyone is that if fixing roads is a priority, then spending needs to decrease in other areas of state government. Walker’s nearly eight years as governor have included no cuts in state employment. Decreasing the annual increase in state spending beats the Democratic alternative, but it is not preferable to actual spending cuts, including transportation areas that don’t benefit most Wisconsinites (i.e. mass transit).
I think this trial balloon will sink in flames like the Hindenburg anyway because the prospects of a politician proposing tolls in an election year is as unlikely as turkeys being able to fly.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 