Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Crouching TIGER, Hidden Funding


I was pleased to see TIGER proposed for permanent authorization in the President’s reauthorization proposal.  It not only gets permanent authorization at a level of $500 million a year, with regular increases, it would come in at $4 Billion in added spending in Fiscal 2012 to push the economy out of depression.  What a great idea!  Too bad it wasn’t done in the past two years of lost growth.  (Also too bad it won’t happen now either.)
As I said before, I believe this is a very successful and meritorious program (http://bit.ly/zZxFQ4).  Other than the fact that during this Congress finding the funding for long-term TIGER will be hard than finding a snow leopard, I am still concerned that TIGER is drifting away from innovative projects and toward projects that are just large and otherwise unfundable (we used to have earmarks for those!).
Still, an encouraging sign of positive thinking from the Administration.

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