Abstract
In 2009, the US government spent more than $42 billion on the federal-aid highway program. Most of this money was raised from motor vehicle taxes, whose proceeds are deposited in the highway trust fund. Federal motor vehicle user taxes flow into the fund and aid expenditures flow out from it to build and maintain highways and other transportation infrastructure. With so much money at stake it should be no surprise that expenditure decisions are the subject of intense political debate. Chief among these debates is the conflict between donor states, whose residents pay more in highway user taxes than the state receives in federal highway aid and donee states, whose residents pay less in highway user taxes than the state receives in highway aid. While this geographic redistribution has been masked recently by infusions of general fund revenue into the trust fund, the debate nevertheless continues. This paper attempts to understand why some states are donors and others are donees by simultaneously testing four hypotheses about the geographic redistribution of federal highway dollars that relate to a state’s highway need, economic condition, level of urbanization, and representation on the key Congressional oversight committees. The analyses show that redistribution does not favor states with larger highway systems, more highway use, or lower median incomes, all of which are different indicators of need. Instead, states that are less urban and better represented on the four key Congressional committees generally benefit from redistribution. These findings indicate that the user tax revenues are not used in places where they are most needed. Thus they provide little empirical support for any compelling policy argument for continued geographic redistribution of federal highway user tax dollars.
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Notes
Recent House rules have imposed an earmark moratorium since 2010. However, some congress members have grown increasingly agitated by this idea and the discussion is continuing.
Also, while consecutive terms of service are generally considered to be of higher status than non-consecutive terms of service, this was not taken into account in this paper. For example, a representative with 13 terms non-consecutive terms of service is considered to influence outcomes with the same impact as a representative with 13 terms consecutive. Both of the representatives with 13 terms of service are considered more influential in the decision making process than those representatives with 12 or fewer terms of service (regardless of whether their 12 or fewer terms were consecutive or not).
This variable does not take into account previous service interrupted by appointment to another position, unsuccessful re-election, or any other event that might have forbid the congressman the ability to serve continuously. Also, it is normal that several senators will share the same rank due to a commonly shared beginning date of present service.
Seniority data for base-years 1998 and 2005 were available for online viewing through the Governmental Printing Office (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=CDIR). For base years 1973, 1982, and 1991, data were obtained through print versions of the respective Congressional directories.
In 2008, the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund received 8.017 billion dollars from the general fund (Table FE-210, at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2008/fe210.cfm). The state apportionment and return ratio provided in Table FE-221 for this year included this transfer amount. To be consistent with other years, we calculate the apportionment that is derived from trust fund user tax revenues only. To do this, we subtract out the transfer money and apportion the reduction based on each state's share of overall apportionments to estimate the new apportionment and return ratio for each state in 2008.
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Legislation
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 (PL 93-87)
Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (PL 102-240)
Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 (PL 97-424)
Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987 (PL 100-17)
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Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (1998) (PL 105-178)
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank John VanDyke at Boise State University for his excellent research assistance in collecting a significant part of the data. We also want to thank the editor David T. Hartgen and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Pengyu Zhu and Jeffrey R. Brown contributed equally to the paper.
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Zhu, P., Brown, J.R. Donor states and donee states: investigating geographic redistribution of the US federal-aid highway program 1974–2008. Transportation 40, 203–227 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-012-9413-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-012-9413-x