Aaron Renn

Reform the Anti-Urban Bias

Urban success strategist and writer, The Urbanophile, Feb 08, 10.

Tagged with transportation, rural, urban

State governments have to stop treating transportation like yet another welfare program.

Among urban and rural areas, who subsidizes whom?

It’s methodologically difficult to measure net taxation, but the studies that have been done suggest that, contrary to the belief of some, urban areas are big time net tax donors. For example, a recent Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute study found that Indiana’s urban and suburban counties generally subsidize rural ones.

Just the consolidated city-county of Indianapolis-Marion County sends $420 million more to the state annually than it receives every year. That’s equal to the entire public safety budget of the city. The rest of the metro area sends another $340 million to the state annually.

Similarly, a 2009 Georgia State University study found that the Atlanta metro area accounted for 61% of state tax collections but only but only 47% of expenditures. A 2004 University of Louisville study found that the state’s three major urban regions – Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky (south suburban Cincinnati) – generate over half the state’s tax revenues but only receive back about one third in state expenditures, an annual net outflow of $1.4 billion per year.

The Atlanta and Indianapolis examples are particularly instructive, since both are the capital and by far the largest city of their state. They are sometimes presumed to benefit from disproportionate state spending as a result, but the reality is quite different.

That’s not to say that this is necessarily bad. The fundamental basis of any government is a commonwealth, a body of citizens who see themselves as fellows, who believe each other’s fates are linked. Thus, generally spreading the burdens on some type of a progressive basis is broadly considered equitable, and assistance to the less fortunate constitutes a core function of government. To the extent that cities generate the most wealth in today’s economy, and have the highest incomes, it is no surprise they pay more in taxes. This doesn’t per se mean there’s an anti-urban bias in policy.

Indeed, income redistribution is one of the key functions of state government. Actual welfare and safety net programs, including things like health care for the poor, are a major budget item in every state. But it goes beyond that. K-12 education could be treated as a purely local service, but every state spends large amounts on it. One could argue this is strictly to ensure a minimum level of funding equity between rich and poor districts. That is, it’s purely redistributive. Indeed, states sadly spend more time fiddling with funding formulas than in actual education reform and improvement. Even corrections disproportionately and unfortunately affects the poor. We are, in effect, a collection of 50 welfare states.

The fact that so many of the functions of state government have taken on a redistributive cast also comes with downsides. Most importantly, even functions that should have little to do with welfare or equity have come to be seen through that lens.

Exhibit A is transportation. Two-thirds of Americans live in large metro areas, yet less than half the federal transportation stimulus funds are going to the top 100 metro areas. Missouri is spending half its stimulus money on 89 small counties that account for only a quarter of the state’s population. In Ohio, the state cancelled plans to spend $100 million in stimulus funds on the crumbling Cleveland Inner Belt bridge in order to divert them to paying for a $150 million bypass around Nelsonville – a town of only 5,000 people. This is part of a plan to construct a four lane divided highway into sparsely populated southeast Ohio as part of a “build it and they will come” economic development plan. Mecklenburg County, NC, the state’s largest and home to Charlotte, received only $7.8 million out of the first $423 million in projects in that state. The Atlantic Monthly described this as a contest between a “mayor’s stimulus” and a “governor’s stimulus” - and the governor won.

Full Story: Reforming Anti-Urban Bias in Transportation Spending
Source: New Geography, February 4, 2010

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