Mass Transit Tax Eaters Spend $3 Million to Convince Legislators to Hike Your Taxes
If it were not bad enough that State Rep. Julie Hamos’ House Bill 572 will double collar county RTA sales taxes and give precious little in return, the Daily Herald’s Joseph Ryan has found this out.
The mass transit tax eaters have spent $3 million to convince legislators to vote “Yes.”The goal?
To increase the average collar county family's sales tax by about $200 a year.
It would have been cheaper in the old days when bribes were paid directly to legislators.
And, such a deal this bill offers those living in the suburbs.Take a look at this graphic of costs and benefits.
If you can’t figure it out, you can find my analysis on McHenry County Blog. The story is entitled,
Suburban Legislators with a Cost-Benefit Analysis Impairment
14 comments:
Hey Skinner, you should instead be proud of the fact that your anti-Chicago and anti-CTA rantings are of such quality that it takes a $3 million campaign to counteract that nonsense spewing from your lips!
If the CTA tanks due to whining from people like you, we're all going to buy cars and move out to 630 Land and you'll suddenly be surrounded by Democrats.
This is just ridiculous. Cal posts a reasonable piece of information, your tax dollars are being spent to lobby for more tax dollars, sort of a recursive relationship and is attacked and threatened.
If you think that people who get next to no benefit from the RTA/CTA (and their are a lot of people in this category) should pay for the RTA, CTA etc explain why please.
If you think tax dollars should be spent lobbying for more tax dollars, explain why please.
The thuggery of the postings here has reached a new low.
JBP
"The thuggery of the postings here has reached a new low."
Yes, Democrats threatening to move to McHenry County is beyond the pale of civilized debate. Especially if the Democrats are mass transit users, since according to Cal 'the Victim' Skinner, no one in McHenry benefits from Metra but everyone is forced to pay one quarter of one percent on sales taxes. The horror.
TAXES are going to DOUBLE! OMG! A half cent on the dollar isn't going to break anybody, so the scare tactics wear thin. Stick to the management reform angle and drop the phony tax protest. Then perhaps the "thuggery" will abate.
47w,
Then say what you mean rather than threatening the poster. If you think a sales tax increase is irrelevant, then post it. Myself, I don't think any amount of taxes would satisfy the bums that run the show, but I can post that as well.
By the way 47w, why cant users pay their own way? Why should people not using a system pay for other people to use a system? Pehaps I have some stuff I would like you to pay for that I use but you don't, would you like to pay for it?
JBP
J.B. Powers,
First of all, I didn’t see the threat you saw in the comment, and I won't condone actual threats. But I’ve been following this debate for almost as long as Cal Skinner has been opposed to regional mass transit in NE IL. I’m pro-mass transit and pro-regional planning, in an almost fanatical way. My Realtors PAC score would be low, if I had one. Let’s agree to disagree on the overall issue of transit v. no-transit.
Cal Skinner is still waging the 1970s Illinois GOP-Libertarian (remember Goldwater Girls and Country Club Republicans in Illinois? – Good times!) fight that Cal Skinner lost when the RTA was created, three decades ago. And he’s still crying about it. He lost that fight, so now he thinks if he wins today, we’ll allow our regional transit system to crumble? Does he think everyday users like me will pay more? (duh, some will, some won’t). I will, and I’ll also continue to press for actual, structural, organizational, governmental, political (aka transformational) reforms of the entire statewide transit system. I’m sure we’d agree on any number of service/management/governance issues, J.B., but Cal’s tax issue is just plain goofy in light of the benefits you receive but apparently don’t realize.
Those universal benefits are still going to cost money, today and tomorrow. I think most families Cal cites would pay $200 for cleaner air and less traffic congestion (plus money for suburban road projects!). Yeah, and every year too, with maybe a little something-something for, you know, inflation. I abhor the mismanagement of the transit agencies in this state, to be clear. But to suggest we simply wash our hands of it, as I believe Cal would prefer, is ridiculous. Cal needs to get over it: he lost.
Better mass transit is better for all of us, and we’re all in this together, remember?
47w,
Thank you for the more reasoned response, though you still are condemning Cal for daring to have a differing opinion than yours.
List those benefits of mass please, tell me why better mass transit is better for all of us. Tell me again why someone who never uses mass transit should pay for someone else to use it? Doesn't paying for it via a sales tax miss the real issuse of pricing transportation at market prices?
I can drive up and down Sheridan in the city all day and count hundreds of empty buses packed together bellowing out black diesel smoke. Does this really provide "cleaner air" and
"less traffic congetsion"
Also tell me why giving more money to a group of habitual moneywasters is suddenly going to make good managers out of them.
I am all for a good mass transit system. This isn't one of them.
JBP
The problem with looking at transit "subsidies" per se is that transit receives government help "above the line," on the ledger books, and benefits the public in a widely dispersed way, off the ledgers. Driving is exactly the opposite. Let's look at some examples:
The Texas Transportation Institute calculates that mass transit saves every rush hour driver in NE Illinois 22 hours of sitting in traffic a year. That's a productivity benefit worth $1.6 billion a year to those drivers alone. Note that RTA's current annual subsidy is about half that amount.
New York's Fiscal Policy Institute calculates that “public spending on mass transit has by far the highest economic multiplier among all industries in New York State”: every $1 spent on transit yields $3.40 in direct local economic output, even before calculating the increased productivity in other economic sectors that transit provides. ("Multiplier" measures the economic effect of an industry outside the industry itself.) In other words, if Illinois is looking to support regional jobs, the best bang for the buck is in transit.
And speaking of economic benefits, our region faces severe cuts in transit service without additional funding. Cuts of similar magnitude proposed this year (but averted by state legislation) in Philadelphia were estimated to cost that region's economy $2.5 billion in wages and $5 billion in property values -- with a typical house losing nearly $7,000 in value, in a region with lower property values and lower job growth. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty bad bargain to me.
Regarding air pollution, it's interesting that you should mention that. The public subsidies to drivers aren't direct (in the form of reduced user costs), but indirect and downstream, mostly for the traffic congestion, air and water pollution, crashes, and road maintenance that drivers cause and demand. The largest single subsidy: air pollution. Americans spend over $56 billion to manage the health effects of autos' air pollution, including, say, the cost of my asthma medication (which I seemingly only need when I bike to work on polluted days like today).
One estimate showed that transit in Northeastern Illinois keeps over 2,500 tons of three key air pollutants (VOCs, NO, and PM) out of the air that we breathe. (Also, the buses you see on Sheridan are nearing the ends of their runs. Look closer into the city and you'll see the same buses packed with riders most of the day.)
All told, estimates of the "social costs" of driving, those not paid by drivers, range from the hundreds of billions of dollars to well over a trillion dollars a year in America. By some estimates, drivers pay less than half of the total cost of their driving.
I hear a lot of people whining about "good mass transit." Such transit costs good money, too: the assorted government subsidies for regional transit in Paris amount to five times more than what RTA gets every year. Even Hong Kong and Tokyo, which are so crowded they make the Gold Coast look like a country retreat, invest huge capital subsidies in transit service.
Let's also take another look at Cal's graph via the Tribune. I think it pretty much demolishes any argument from the collar counties: we Chicagoans will send 61% more money into the RTA (through two! new taxes) than we will get out of this in additional CTA operating funds.
Really, the proposed legislation is a small price to pay for to keep Northeastern Illinois' economy moving along. Without transit, which is where we'll be on January 1 without this, our region's economy will be in huge trouble.
Ohhh yeah, and one last point: "habitual moneywasters"? Where did that appear in the auditor general's 650 page report?
pc,
Probably in the bus fumes of one of the empty buses chasing each other up and down Sheridan Road, or lost in a cannabis haze among the drug dealers at the Howard El Stop, maybe behind one of the $65,000 ticket machines that did not work.
If everyone values this so much, why wouldn't they pay more for a ticket? Better yet, perhaps someone might consider using the private sector to provide mass transit, much like it was before Harold Ickes appropriated the El for the government.
Here is the Sam Adams Alliance on privatization
http://www.cdobs.com/tank/efficient-public-transportation-if-london-can-do-it-why-not-chicago/
JBP
JB, perhaps you didn't see the news: one of the PPPs created to run the Underground recently declared bankruptcy and might leave the public on the hook for billions of dollars in cost overruns.
The "L" almost never made money for its owners in the pre-CTA years. Insull died a poor and broken man, and Yerkes profited off securities fraud, not operations.
pc,
So let them go bankrupt, that is the nature of markets, rather than Socialism. Another company will step in to pick up the assets and continue operations if there is a profit in it.
And Sam Insull was neither poor, nor broken having successfully defended himself vs. a pFitz style witchunt. He major sin was having the nerve to offer low electric rates and stay reasonably clear of the same-old Illinois graft, which certainly miffed Ickes and his competitors enough to use confiscate his assets.
JBP
Then let the road system go bankrupt as well, and don't whine for a capital bill. Oh, and let the schools go under, and the libraries, and the Department of Defense -- who did they ever benefit?
Really, though, I tried to provide a valid argument for why mass transit deserves some level of government support above, but you'll never be convinced of the matter. I think that gas prices should be doubled to cover the social costs of driving, and we'll never agree on either point.
Thanks Mr. p.c.
You have entered a reasoned argument, rather than a simple condemnation of the origial poster.
If commenters put 1/10 of the thought into their scribblings that you have, the internet would be a 10x more valuable forum for political discussion.
JBP
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