Theft at the Public Till
1 corridor in and about Princeton New Jersey is dramatically affected by traffic congestion. While many suggestions for how to fix the problem have been made during the past twenty years, each has led only to yet another study or a suggestion for some form of mass transit. What the good citizens of Princeton need however is less congestion and now, not in ten years. In 1985 the New Jersey Turnpike Authority raised $2 billion for ex- tensions and improvements to its road, which is the spine of the Northeast Corridor. When it became obvious that environmental concerns would block the expenditure of most of this money for the original road work as planned, did the leaders of New Jersey examine using funds on hand for the Route 1 corridor? No. Instead, they spent months on a plan to use the funds to build a baseball stadium. It is not that I am against baseball, but I do believe that baseball owners can pay for their own stadium. That the public and our children would derive more benefit from a publicly built stadium to house a privately owned team, than from having reasonable traffic levels in perhaps the most vibrant part of New Jersey -- this is the calculus I do not believe in. Why? There was no political benefit in taking on a project that would tie up local roads for the two years or so it would be under construc- tion, if the only immediate beneficiaries would be those people who lived there. Bad politics in that. No, the good citizens were instead promised a baseball team. Just think of the civic pride! The net result was that the money went back from whence it had come -- and the only real beneficiaries were the toll payers on the Turnpike -- they avoided a toll increase for five years while the money that could have gone for construction earned interest in the bank. For the citizens of Princeton this was an immediate theft; but in terms of long-term impact it was a missed opportunity that will effect all of the citizens of New Jersey. There could have been a higher quality of life in the Princeton corridor. That in turn would have attracted more and better jobs along with a more vibrant econ- omy. This was sacrificed for the sake of avoiding toll hikes and the mythical possibility of a baseball team. There is nothing to check the growth of aggregate demand for gov- ernment programs. Thus individual interest groups or lobbies keep yelling
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