“Why Your Prius Will Bankrupt Our Highways”
The jist:
Since back in the Eisenhower era, the federal government has maintained a Highway Trust Fund, paid for mostly by taxes on fuel, that helps cover the repair and construction of our country’s roads, bridges, and mass transit. The idea was that drivers themselves should bear some of the cost the roads they used. Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1993. Since then, inflation has eaten away at least a third of its value.
…
First, Americans started caring about the fuel efficiency again, as skyrocketing oil prices ended the era of gas-guzzling SUVs. Then the recession struck, and penny-pinching drivers logged fewer miles to save on gas. Today, Americans are still using less fuel than they did just a few years ago. As a result, they’re paying fewer gas taxes, and less money is flowing into the Highway Trust Fund, which is now facing potential insolvency in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The current House transportation bill would spend about$50 billion more than what the fund can pay for. A more modest Senate version would spend $12 billion more.
Insofar as these trends aren’t going away, [the tolls around Chicago seem to think so, at least] isn’t it a good time to invest in high-speed rail?
In the blink of an eye …
I don’t think it really occurred to me how fast that happened:
Seoul today is one of the densest cities in the world. It has millions of cars but also an excellent subway system. Even in the newer districts the streets seem, to a Westerner, anything but colorless. They’re vibrant with commerce and crowded with pedestrians, each of whom has a carbon footprint less than half the size of a New Yorker’s. Life has gotten much better for Koreans as the country has gone from 28 percent urban in 1961 to 83 percent today. Life expectancy has increased from 51 years to 79—a year longer than for Americans. Korean boys now grow six inches taller than they used to.
ht The Dish
This BAMF is so totally playing for 2016. I haven’t liked a Republican this much in a long time.
“The indignity of the industrial tomato.”
Barry Estabrook writes on the zombielike qualities of America’s second most popular fruit:
If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.
Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.
Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology. Florida is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest—within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck—is cold. But Florida is notoriously humid. Tomatoes’ wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth.
Estabrook just came out with a book on the topic, and blogs all about tomatoes at politicsoftheplate.com.
Something like Atul Gawande…
or, at least, this article reminds me of his earlier article in the New Yorker:
One of the hardiest hopes in the chronic-disease wars has been that of a compression of morbidity—a long life with little illness followed by a brief period of disability and then a quick death. A concept first introduced by James Fries in 1980, it has had the special attraction of providing a persuasively utopian view of the future of medicine. And it has always been possible to identify very old people who seemed to have the good fortune of living such a life—a kind of end run on medicine—and then dying quickly. But a recent and very careful study by Eileen Crimmins and Hiram Beltran-Sanchez of the University of Southern California has determined that the idea has no empirical support. Most of us will contract one or more chronic diseases later in life and die from them, slowly. “Health,” Crimmins and Beltran-Sanchez write, “may not be improving with each generation” and “compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality. We do not appear to be moving to a world where we die without experiencing disease, functioning loss, and disability.”
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In light of the fact that we are not curing most diseases, we need to change our priorities for the elderly. Death is not the only bad thing that can happen to an elderly person. An old age marked by disability, economic insecurity, and social isolation are also great evils.
Does NO ONE at the National Review understand the problems he already has with Google search results?
Lowell Massachusetts…
“When you’re 17, that’s when most of us are seniors,” said Carline Kirksey, one of the youth leaders of the campaign. “You have more adult responsibilities. You can join the military. You can be tried as an adult in court.”
Another organizer Corinne Plaisir chimes in, saying that at 18 many young people are off at college. Figuring out the process all alone and voting unceremoniously by absentee ballot aren’t exactly enticements to civic participation. Instead, argues Plaisir, if young people can start voting in high school as part of their civics education, “It’s a prime time to engage in our civic rights.”Plus research has shown that when teens engage in even mock elections, their voter turnout as adults increases by almost 10 percent.
Ouch.
The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.
Those are some rough numbers.
I would like to draw attention…
…to how funny this is. Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley is concerned about voter fraud:
“I don’t know why everybody’s so puzzled by this,” said Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, sponsor of a controversial election-reform law there….Baxley said the lax address requirement opened the door to abuse, like a city council election he heard about in which the “pro-family” candidate was favored to win until his
opponent, “a homosexual activist candidate,” bused in homosexuals from other parts of the state who showed up at the polls and claimed residency at an address occupied by a local Dunkin Donuts.
(1) buses of Florida homosexuals.
(2) the phrase “homosexual activist candidate.”
(3) deciding that it was the Dunkin Donuts that would serve as the best cover.
