Heartland Daily Podcast – Randal O’Toole: Funding for Highway Construction and Transportation Infrastructure

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Jesse Hathaway

Jesse Hathaway is the managing editor of the Budget & Tax News Heartland publication. Before joining the Heartland Institute, Hathaway worked for Media Trackers, a conservative non-profit news organization active in 5 states. His investigatory research has appeared in local, state, and national publications including The Daily Caller, Drudge Report, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

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Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole joins Budget & Tax News managing editor Jesse Hathaway to talk about his work on changing the way the federal government funds highway construction and transportation infrastructure projects. O’Toole explains how the current funding system, based on discretionary grants, is inefficient and wasteful, and proposes a formula-based system.

Formula-based funding, O’Toole says, would fix many of the problems with the current system, removing political considerations and other inefficiencies from decisions on how infrastructure projects are funded. Also, shifting to a formula-based funding system would reduce cities’ incentive to build larger projects than are actually needed, as the system would be based on actual population and ridership statistics.

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