Papers of the Day
Two by the same authors, Jason Junge and David Levinson. First up, “Economic and equity effects of transportation utility fees.” Transportation utility fees are a financing mechanism for transportation that treats the network as a utility and bills properties in proportion to their use, rather than their value as with the property tax. This connects the costs of maintaining the infrastructure more directly to the benefits received from mobility and access to the system. The fees are based on trips generated and vary with land use. This paper evaluates the fees as an alternative fundin

More Stimulus?
Noam Scheiber points out the odd conclusions Democratic legislators seem to be drawing from yesterday’s election — that they need to go slower, do less, and worry more about the deficit. Why anyone would conclude as much is absolutely beyond me. If the American public is at all concerned about the state of the president’s agenda and the Congressional agenda, that concern must surely reflect the fact that so little has been done. But any backlash against incumbents among the non-crazy majority that continues to detest Republicans is directly related to the awful economy. If Dem

There Are More Important Things Than Politics
I care not a whit for the effort to assign some national importance, as far as political implications go, to the results of yesterday’s elections. I don’t believe the results are very reflective of national sentiment, and to the extent that they are, they’re irrelevant, as the world will probably look a lot different in another 12 (or 36) months. As a resident of the Washington metropolitan area, however, I do care very much about the policy impact of political outcomes in the District and neighboring states. And I am very worried about the state of Virginia, right now. And if I were Bob McDonnell, I’d be terrified. As Matt

Money for Something
What if for one year — just one year — we allocated as much money for infrastructure as we did for defense? What if? Well, this year, that would mean devoting $680 billion to investments in infrastructure. That’s more than $200 billion more than Oberstar’s entire proposed transportation reauthorization bill, which was itself a large increase over the previous transportation law. There’s probably no way we could spend all that money at once, but it would nicely capitalize an infrastructure bank, and the promise of a steady flow of funds would get states think

Question for Nate Silver or Others Like Him
There are many sources of dysfunction in the Senate, but the two you most often hear about are the filibuster and the fact that small states are so overrepresented (cue stat on senators per person in California, relative to Wyoming). I’m wondering, though: what exerts more of a distorting effect on the Senate, the fact that small states are overrepresented or the fact that rural voters are overrepresented? In other words, are urban voters in Montana more like urban voters in Illinois or rural voters in Montana? And if the Senate continued to involve equal representation of states, regardless of population, but voting within states was changed to give urban voters a