Highway Trust Fund
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters is warning that the Federal Highway Trust Fund could run out of money by the end of this month, reports the AP. The fund is facing an $8.3 billion shortfall in projected revenues, primarily due to high gas prices reducing the amount of fuel purchased by American consumers. The immediate impact would be a delay or reduction in payments for local road and bridge projects the government had agreed to partially fund, likely resulting in a delay or reduction in work by construction crews. While the current recommendation is to borrow from the general fund through the end of the fiscal year, we suggest tapping Detroit automakers for low-interest loans, allowing the transportation department to invest in new highway technology and replace aging stretches of obsolete asphalt.
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offbeat news
The federal government fleet now totals 642,233 vehicles and cost taxpayers $3.4 billion last year, according to the
AP by way of the
Detroit News. As one might expect, the government doesn't know exactly why it has so many cars and trucks — even within individual agencies, the report states, some vehicles sit unused and one has even disappeared entirely. In other cases, agencies were told to cut their fleets but instead added vehicles. On top of that, high-level officials pay drivers — multiple drivers, in the case of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters — exorbitant salaries. How exorbitant?
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government waste
What you see above is an International MXT. It is a vehicle that the United States Border Patrol, no doubt through grants from the Department of Homeland Security, has deemed a reasonable vehicle to patrol the highest traffic border crossing between the United States and Canada, the Detroit-Windsor crossing. There are, shall we say, a couple of things wrong here. First, this particular unit was caught outside of Mexican Fiesta in Dearborn during the lunch hour feeding frenzy. To help visualize the distance between said establishment and the nearest border crossing, we've employed the services of Google Earth after the leap.
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Jalopnik
