Pork For Me

As a Massachusetts cycling advocate, I'm pleased to see that $40 million was appropriated to improve and extend the Commonwealth's bike paths. Terrific: bike paths are generally underfunded and poorly maintained, and benefits of building them accrue to health and neighborhood safety as well as transportation and recreation. But the $40 million was appropriated by Congress. It's just my piece of $286 billion pie divied up among transport projects around the country, very few of which are genuinely interstate in nature. Yet, under the liberally interpreted Interstate Commerce Clause, Congress can give (or withhold) money to local projects anywhere in the USA. This is not, of course, a new means of undermining federalism, but just another trudging step in the same misguided direction that Washington has been going for a century now.