Kill Pork and Davis-Bacon

Not much optimism here that Illinois Combine member Republican Rep. Ray LaHood will be a judicious steward of taxpayer dollars as Obama's new Transportation Secretary, given his porky record, but we can always hope. An Op-Ed by Clifford Winston in the WSJ with some hopeful guidance, including this:

It takes the nation's busiest airports decades and billions of dollars to build new runways, for example, because of onerous regulations imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Davis-Bacon mandates, which effectively require that "prevailing" union wages (often much higher than the actually prevailing market wage) be paid to workers on any construction project receiving federal funds, also drive up the costs of roads and other federal transport projects. The Federal Transit Act also makes it extremely expensive to lay off transit employees.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if even inflated costs brought back large returns. In co-authored peer-reviewed research, I've published two papers on this subject in recent years in the Journal of Urban Economics. What I found was that over the past decade we have reaped a mere 1% return on our highway investments. And what's more, for every $1 the government has spent trying to reduce roadway congestion, motorists have saved a mere three cents in travel time and other costs.

Sigh.

P.S. An alternative.