Theft at the Public Till
and airplane tickets were created by Congress in the early 1970s to pay for infrastructure improvements. The gasoline tax was to be used to fund high- way repairs and renovations, and a share of passengers' airline ticket costs was to offset the costs of maintaining airports. As the federal deficit began to increase, however, Congress took to holding back portions of these dedi- cated taxes in order to cover the government's growing red ink. In 1990, the legislature stipulated that one-half of a new gasoline tax increase won't even go to the Highway Trust Fund at all. The inability of Congress to control spending and tackle the deficit has not only weakened domestic agencies, but also has weakened-at times literally-the physical fabric of the country. The so-called budgets cuts weren't really that. They were, instead, a re- duction in projected federal spending, meaning the government was simply going to spend less than it had originally planned and that amount would be called savings-even though it was still spending more each year than the year before. This is something you can do only using someone else's money. It would be like your husband coming home and saying that he decided not to buy a $500 television set and instead bought a $300 suit. So you "saved" $200. Try telling that to the guy at the bank when your check bounces. One of the most perverse types of subsidy is the Maritime Administration, which is responsible for regulating the nation's merchant marine fleet. Since George Washington decreed that the nation should ship cargo on its own boats, a dense web of subsidies costing as much as $5 billion a year has grown up around shipping and turned it into one of the country's largest welfare recipients. By some estimates, the Mining Law alone restricts the government to leases that are $1 billion below what it could get on the open market. And none of this takes into consideration the environmental costs that occur when you undersell a public asset. One provision in the defense bill said that U. S. bases in Europe couldn't buy foreign coal or burn natural gas to heat their facilities, but instead had to ship in anthracite coal-no substitutes would do-from the United States. Overall, the Pentagon annually buys 300,000 tons, or 10 percent of the nation's output, of high-sulfur anthracite coal, a less desirable fuel than bitu- minous coal, that nevertheless costs the federal government several hundred
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