Quote:
Originally Posted by Zmapper
Republicans did not vote to de-fund transit completely, they voted to eliminate federally funded transit. Big, big, big difference there.
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If you want to eliminate federal transportation funding entirely, reduce taxes accordingly, and push it back on the states to fund themselves, fine, that's a discussion I think would be worth having. (Especially since I happen to live in a relatively wealthy and low-tax state - we'd be fine. Whether that would be best for America overall might be a different question.)
But what the House did was maintain the existing federal funding scheme, but try to remove transit from it entirely. Which would have had the very real effect of diverting that money to highways, not back to states. You do not get to hide behind a bogus states rights argument - that is a blatant lie. It was a move at the
federal level to take
federal dollars and shift them to a different set of
federal priorities. In this case, to defund transit and shift it to highways, period, end of story. To characterize it as anything else is a lie. Again, you're entitled to your own opinions, but you don't get to massage the facts.
I would like to have the real states' rights argument though - why do we rely on federal grants at all? Of course, Colorado is a state that sends more to Washington than we get back, so we're generally comfortable having that argument. If you actually have any care for America at all, though (you know, America the country, not the slogan), you don't play those Germany-versus-Greece cards here. That's not what we're about.
Those of us in the real world work with the system we have, not the one we wish we had. Axe the federal tax and shift it to the state level - in Colorado, we'd probably benefit from that. But that's
not what the House proposed now, is it? I'm happy to change the system, or at least discuss it. But I am not going to misrepresent it in order to push an agenda. Maybe some people are dumb enough to buy that crap, but you won't find many of us on here.