Dinner with the Governor

Posted by Marc Hodak on March 28, 2008 under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article

Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, that is. We’ve never hung out, but the Governor strikes me as a decent guy. He’s caring, intelligent, and has a sense of humor. His economic literacy, I’m not so sure about that.

Governor Rendell devoted his entire talk last night discussing our infrastructure. He noted that Pennsylvania and the rest of the nation are suffering horribly from deferred maintenance. He had the numbers to prove it. Good enough. But, there was one point he repeatedly brought up:

The states can’t do it alone. The states supply 75 percent of the spending on infrastructure, but it’s not enough. Ours is the only federal government among the wealthy nations that does so little for its infrastructure. The federal government has to be part of the solution.

So, I asked him:

Governor, isn’t that saying that the taxpayers of Pennsylvania should pay for infrastructure in Alaska, and taxpayers of Alaska should be paying for infrastructure in Pennsylvania? That bargain hasn’t worked well for Pennsylvanians in the past.

It was two questions, really. The first asked why he supposed there would be more money from the taxpayers collectively than there is from the sum of them individually. The second asked what benefit there was by taking the same pool of money and funneling it through Washington, D.C..

His answer to the first half would have been shocking if it didn’t come from a politician: “The federal government can always find the money.” That’s right, he literally said “find.” The money is out there, the government simply needs to “find” it. Nobody in the room who heard this non-answer seemed surprised. His answer to the second half was barely better: “We’d need to insure accountability in the distribution of such funds via a panel of experts.” We know how that works out.