AFL-CIO warns Bush in 2002: Stop slashing billions from America's transportation infrastructure!

Bluebear

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Thu Aug-02-07 09:00 AM
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AFL-CIO warns Bush in 2002: Stop slashing billions from America's transportation infrastructure!

Originally published: February 02, 2002
Highways, Transit, Amtrak and Air Traffic Privatization And the Bush Budget for 2003

The Bush budget contemplates significant funding cuts and other changes for the nation's transportation infrastructure and systems. The proposals affect highway, rail and air transport. Far from helping ensure needed infrastructure improvements, greater efficiencies or enhanced quality of services, the Bush proposals are likely to create or exacerbate problems in the national transportation system.

Bush Budget for TEA-21

A great deal of our basic national surface transportation infrastructure -highways, mass transit, bridges and the like- is funded under TEA-21, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the 1998 law that authorized funding for federal highway and transit programs for fiscal years 1998-2003. Despite an unobligated cash balance of $18.5 billion in the Highway Trust Fund, the Bush budget for fiscal 2003 slashes $9 billion in highway spending under TEA-21.

* The effect of the Administration's proposed 29% drop in funding for highway spending will be to cut jobs in a recession-wracked economic climate, to under-invest in the needed basic physical infrastructure that underlies national growth and development, and to ignore a backlog of needs that TEA-21 has addressed the past four years.

* By relying on a quirk in the TEA-21 spending mechanism to justify these cuts in highway infrastructure spending, the Bush budget is ignoring the level of investment strongly supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as appropriate to meeting long-term national infrastructure needs.

* A billion dollars invested in highway construction creates more than 42,000 jobs. The drastic cut in funding the Administration proposes will ripple through the economy beyond construction to manufacturing, services and other industries and affect jobs and the economy for years to come.

* Industry groups estimate that the Bush cut could result in the loss of 380,000 jobs over the next ten years. The immediate job threat is summed up well by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which says, "There are 140,000 paychecks on the line here." Under-investment in the national transportation infrastructure leads to inefficiencies in transport and delays in travel for business and for the traveling and commuting public. Adequate investments in highway construction are also a key building block for ensuring homeland security. Indeed, national security was one of the key reasons motivating President Eisenhower's commitment to building a solid, well-maintained interstate highway system.

The President’s budget choices request for workers and their unions could not be clearer: when it comes to cuts, he asks the most of working families.

http://www.aflcio.org/issues/ns0205f2002.cfm?RenderForPrint=1