Matthew Yglesias is complaining that too much transit is going towards rural states:
Only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas, and the quantity is dropping, so naturally the U.S. Department of Transportation proudly announced today that “of the $500 million in TIGER 2012 funds available for grants, more than $120 million will go to critical projects in rural areas.”
This has been one of Yglesias’s ongoing things, the overspending in rural America. To be honest, in the case of transit, the Interstates out here are probably nicer than they need to be. They’re repaving the Interstate between Callie and Redstone when, to be honest, I hadn’t noticed the slightest bit of a problem. So I’m not entirely unsympathetic to his viewpoint.
He goes on…
You see this basic dynamic in all kinds of federal grant programs. Typically any kind of rational grant formula would fail to give money to rural areas in a manner that’s consistent with rural areas’ strength in the U.S. Senate. Therefore you end up with either implicit or explicit special set-asides for rural areas.
It’s an article of faith among many that because of that damnable Senate, we overspend in rural areas. There is some truth to it, but it’s actually more complicated than it appears, if we are to look at aggregate spending. Per-capita spending in Montana and the Dakotas, for instance, ranges from somewhat to very high (between 12-30% more than the national average). However, public spending in Idaho is comparable to that of California (-10%) and Utah is downright cheap (-20%, only Minnesota gets less) despite the fact that they have two senators just like everywhere else. Wyoming is a special case, bringing in a lot of money due on account of its natural resources and the NMLA. Take that out (and we should, since that’s merely kicking half of their money back to them) and they’re somewhere below average. If the senate were as powerful as they say in the making of donor states and beneficiary states, this would not really be the case. Of course, the aggregate power of the farming states and the senate leads to the farm subsidies, which I believe to be among the things that differentiate Montana and the Dakotas (and others) from Idaho and Utah (which do less farming).
He does have a point with regard to the low unemployment rates.
On Yglesias’s other point, we don’t traditionally spend federal funds in accordance with who delivers the taxation. There are some attempts at this, with Social Security and whatnot, and there are government favors that rich people buy, but it’s not our organizing principle. We try to hand it out according to economic need, and per-capita transit (for example) is going to cost more in rural places than urban ones. Complaints that they’re not “earning their keep” and suggesting that we deny further assistance on this basis are not ones the people making this argument make in many other contexts. To be fair, it may be in our interest to invest more in economic hotspots and areas of economic growth with an eye towards spurring people to move there, but there are reasons not to go whole-hog and simply smoke people out by denying them infrastructure (by denying them farm subsidies on the other hand…).
Disclosure: I live in a rural place. This not a permanent arrangement and it’s unlikely that we will end up in a place as rural as we are now.
Rural transportation infrastructure is to the benefit of urban dwellers. One would think that is immediately obvious — without an adequate rural transportation network, agriculture would be significantly more expensive and depend even more heavily on subsidies than it already does.
Not all things are appropriately placed in urban or suburban areas, particularly those which have undesirable proximity effects like landfills and power plants. Some things can’t be other than where they are, like dams and the lakes they create. Some things must be removed from urban areas by their nature, like national forests. But we need (or at least really want) these things, and there must be access to them.
Then there’s the connector highways; I think about I-5 between Los Angeles and Sacramento, for instance. There’s huge economic activity, and not just agriculture, depending on this highway going through mostly rural areas.
This. If we are to have transportation subsidies at all, it is unimaginable that any such program will avoid a heavy disproportion in favor of rural areas.
Burt, thanks. I was wanting to address this, but couldn’t figure out a way to do so that didn’t come across as a “No Farms, No Food” bumper sticker. You did so admirably. I hadn’t even thought about nuclear power plants.
(In MattY’s defense, I *think* the thing he is specifically referring to is actually local transportation rather than the Farm-to-Market sort. But He and I both end up discussing things beyond that.)
Complaints that they’re not “earning their keep” and suggesting that we deny further assistance on this basis are not ones the people making this argument make in many other contexts.
Sure, but in other contexts the people not earning their keep vote for Democrats.
A little less uncharitably, a common complaint about the rural states is that they are so ungrateful. Not just by voting R, but by complaining about the government that’s giving more to then than it’s taking. There may be something to that, I suppose, though less charitably it comes across that not only are they ungrateful, they haven’t learned their place (the suggestion of a couple League commenters that beneficiary states ought to be barred from opposing regulations directed their way or have their funding cut did little to disspell this uncharitable view).
Are complaints about people who aren’t “earning their keep” really what we want entering the mainstream?
I see quite a few things happening in a fairly short period of time if these arguments are internalized…
“If the senate were as powerful as they say in the making of donor states and beneficiary states, this would not really be the case.”
Or, the spending would be less robust than it is already. By which I mean, if, say, Idaho falls short in what it gets, then maybe it would fall even shorter were it not for the Senate.
Pierre, my fear is that without the senate, the mountain west would be left to rot. So what you say may well be true. My point though is that, unless you can point to where Idaho and Utah are getting things out-of-line with their population, it brings to question what their senate seats are unfairly getting them (other than the avoidance of rot) outside of the earning-your-keep argument, which has its dangers.
I think it matters more how the funds are allocated within the state.
In Illinois, God help you if you have to drive through some of those roads out in the county. Interstates are maintained fairly well. But if the slightest bit of snow falls, they’re all over it.
In Iowa, the county roads are better, but they just leave the cars that slide into the ditch along I-80 sitting there through the winter; and there are quite a lot of them at times.
Wisconsin seems to maintain a good balance of maintenance and safety. Indiana maintains their roads, but I’ve never been there through the winter.
Things are different from place to place.
I really don’t see what Yglesias is complaining about.
Different places do indeed have different needs. And it just gets more complicated from there.