THE RENT SEEKERS MAKE COMMON CAUSE WITH THE PURVEYORS OF FREE STUFF.

Reason's Christian Britschgi breaks down the latest infrastructure bill the Congress will take up.  "The 'Moving Forward Framework' includes some sensible reforms alongside expensive, dubious policy proposals."

First, because the framework originated in the Democrats' caucus, you know there's somebody going to call congestion pricing or tolling or urban driving permits regressive.

The Democrats' Moving Forward Framework calls for spending $434 billion on highways and public transportation over the next five years. Congressional authorization for the current road and transit programs expires at the end of 2020. The plan released today suggests that some means of paying for infrastructure repairs and expansions could be curtailed. It calls for "tighter standards around tolling and congestion pricing."

Wider use of traditional tolls and congestion pricing (whereby motorists are charged an additional fee as a means of moderating traffic congestion) would be one way of getting the users of road infrastructure to pay for it directly. By placing additional federal limits on tolls and congestion fees, the federal government would be even more dependent on traditional tax revenue.

Presumably there is enough income and wealth for the likes of a president named Warren or Sanders to extract that fair share of taxes from millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.  It's probably politically inexpedient for a Democrat to suggest that the road commissions run the roads like businesses.  If I were in charge, I'd send it back for more work.  "Perhaps we start by contemplating the fiscal drain that those open roads represent, and asking the beneficiaries to bear the burdens."

The essay appears in Reason, and it exhibits the usual blind spot transportation essays originating there have about Passenger Rail.

In addition to the highway and transit portions, the House Democrats' proposal calls for $55 billion in order to expand passenger rail service. That includes worrisome language about building "higher-speed passenger rail corridors" and continuing to subsidize Amtrak's money-losing long-distance routes.

If by "higher-speed passenger rail corridors" we mean Free Rein to 110, the simplest way to get a lot of that is to repeal or modify the regulations that limit most passenger trains to 79 mph: with positive train control a lot of that trackage is good for 110 right now; and, leaving aside the accounting fiddles that make it look like the long distance routes are money losers, well, they'd lose less money with additional frequencies.

Now, if the Democrats were serious about giving people incentives to drive less, emit less carbon, and ride more trains, wouldn't they recognize that additional tolling and congestion pricing do just that?