It’s bad enough when the Mainstream Media imposes a simplistic meta-narrative on the transportation debate (See my column, “Transportation Abomination“), but it’s impossible for the reading public to understand the issues when a daily newspaper as important as the Richmond Times-Dispatch provides misleading coverage like the article that Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro wrote today.
The thrust of the story is that support is building among the 12 Senate and House conferees for a transportation plan that looks a lot more like the House version than the Senate version. Here’s how the story starts:
Road plan support builds
Committee leaning toward the anti-tax House version of billby Michael Hardy and Jeff E. Schapiro
The compromise on new money for transportation might not be much of one after all.
With most of the 12 negotiators siding with the anti-tax House on roads and rail, legislators are anticipating an up-or-down vote on a plan that relies on $2 billion in borrowing and diverts substantial tax dollars from education, law enforcement and human services.
The anti-tax House? The supposedly anti-tax House approved a transportation funding plan that called for the following statewide fines, fees and taxes: (1) abusive driver penalties, $61 million; (2) diesel fuel tax, $20 million; overweight trucks penalties, $30 million; vehicle registration fee, $71 million. Additionally, the House approved packages of taxes that would allow Northern Virginians to increase regional taxes, levies and fees by $383 million a year and Hampton Roadsters by $209 million. My calculator says that adds up to $774 million in new fees, fines and levies. (Important caveat: Those numbers come from the bill as submitted. It may have been modified along the way. Regardless, those are numbers that the “anti-tax” House approved at least at one point.)
Admittedly, the imposition of new taxes is smaller than what the Senate is calling for, but it’s not what any honest person would call “anti-tax.” Interestingly, Hardy and Schapiro never apply the moniker “pro-tax” to factions in the General Assembly that want to raise taxes even more, even though such a descriptor would be more in concert with the facts.
As for the snarky comment that the compromise for transportation “might not be much of one after all,” it omits the fact that House/Senate GOP package already represents a compromise of factions that hardly see eye-to-eye.
Hardy and Schapiro compound their “anti-tax” label with their trope that the GOP compromise plan would “divert substantial tax dollars from education, law enforcement and human services” — a characterization right out of the Democratic Party talking points. In fact, the GOP would take money from the General Fund surplus, not monies allocated to existing programs, which have been lavished with increases in the 15 to 20 percent range this biennial budget — context that also goes AWOL in their articles. Only in the sense that the surplus funds could have been spent on schools and human services programs, launching their funding into hyper-drive, instead of, oh, say, returning money to taxpayers, could it be said that the GOP tax plan would “divert” anything.
The GOP tax plan is awful — I’ve characterized it as the Transportation Abomination — and I think it deserves to be defeated. But at least I characterize the contents of it accurately. I don’t portray the package as something that it isn’t. I also make my biases plain for all to see. The T-D newsroom still pretends to be objective.