You could be forgiven if you thought you saw Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman wandering around Capitol Hill recently. Worthy of his motto “What, me worry?” Congress is spending money now and worrying about how to pay for it later.  The latest example appeared last week, when House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), along with House colleagues Ranking Committee Member John Mica (R-FL), Subcommittee Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR), and Ranking Subcommittee Member John Duncan (R-TN), stood before the American people and announced that Congress will pass a half a trillion dollar transportation plan (large pdf of entire proposed bill; smaller summaries are also available here and here before the current program expires on September 30th, but didn’t give us a clue as to how they’ll pay for it.

This announcement brought on an eerie sense of déjà vu. In November 2003, then T&I Committee Chairman Don Young (R-AK) stood alongside then-Ranking Member Oberstar and told a packed room with complete confidence that they would shepherd through a $375 billion transportation bill, paid for with an unpopular nickel per gallon increase in the Highway Trust Fund.

In the nearly two years it took to get a final bill to President George W. Bush, it became obvious that Rep. Young’s proposal never had a snowball’s chance of getting passed. Instead, we got a bill, dubbed SAFETEA-LU, which rang in at $286 billion and didn’t include an increase in the gas tax, but was stuffed full of so many earmarks we were afraid it was going to burst. This was the bill that carried the Bridge to Nowhere , after all.

We said at the time that this bill was too large to be paid for with reasonably projected revenues, and lo and behold: the Highway Trust Fund went broke, requiring an $8 billion infusion last year and likely the same or more this year just to keep its head above water. The Government Accountability Office recently revealed a Department of Transportation estimate that indicates the transportation program will need as much as $15 billion in additional funds to make it through fiscal year 2010 at current spending levels.

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Now another transportation deadline looms, and Rep. Oberstar is proposing a $450 billion plan, with an additional $50 billion on top from the general fund (regular spending, not trust fund) for high speed rail, and expressed all the same confidence of passage that we saw during that November 2003 hearing.

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But it gets worse. Rep. Oberstar proffered this increase in spending while putting off for another day the toughest question of all: how will we pay for it? At least Rep. Young gets some credit for proposing to pay for his oversized plan. Rep. Oberstar’s bill is much larger, and we’re supposed to buy the wink and a nod that says we’ll find a way to pay for it later? It’s that kind of accounting that has us staring down the barrel of trillions in debt and has the Highway Trust Fund teetering on the brink of collapse.

Don’t get us wrong, there are some proposals to cheer about in Rep. Oberstar’s bill. We appreciate efforts to speed up project delivery, collapse the number of programs that the bill funds, and create a results-driven process that focuses on unsnarling the nation’s worsening congestion and making our roads safer. But without a plan to pay for it, this is just more wide-eyed dreaming. Congress needs to spend as much – or more – time figuring out how to overcome the tremendous revenue challenges our nation’s transportation program faces as it does coming up with new and grander ways to spend the money.

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