My general philosophy about taxes is that they should be spent, first and foremost, on roads, schools, and police. Everything after that is up for debate, but I feel that all serious pundits should at least be able to agree on that.
Carpool lanes gained popularity among local governments in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The idea was to reduce congestion by promoting carpooling. Right away, you have to ask the question: should the government be dictating our behavior? Obviously, to some degree, you have to say “yes”. The government should be telling us that we can’t murder or steal - no argument there. But these days it seems that the government is trying to tell us everything about how we should live our lives: don’t smoke, don’t plant grass, carpool to work, work for someone else - don’t be an entrepeneur, invest in real estate instead of the stock market (more on those last two in later topics). Personally, I don’t feel that it’s the government’s job to tell us where, when, and with how many people we should drive. It’s the government’s responsibility to provide the roads for us to drive on - that’s what we pay them for.
Even if you’re a government-is-your-nanny-type, you have to ask another question. After 20 years of carpool lanes, is it working? I’ll admit that I don’t have empirical data on the subject, but just looking around when I drive to work, I see 4 full lanes and one empty lane. I saw that when I lived in California, and I see that here in Colorado. Does it really do us any good to have an extra lane that barely anyone uses? Here in Colorado, I’m pretty sure that the government agrees with my assessment, because they just convinced us to pass a bill that allows them to charge people who ride alone to use the lane. They must be desperate to get more passengers in the carpool lane.
This is wrong on several levels. First of all, why don’t you just open up the lane to everyone? I’m not sure what the stated answer is to that, but I know one reason is that they’ve built this special lane that’s completely separate from the “commoners” on the freeway and it seems strange to have this special freeway/lane that has no significance except for being a relic of a bad idea. But now we’ve made a bad situation worse by turning our freeways into an oligarchy where the privileged few get their own freeway and the rest of us have to sit in traffic. It’s basically a toll road, except we’re not talking about a road that gets people who live in suburban mansions into the city quickly. We’re talking about a major freeway that connects one major city to another major city(with several cities in between).
This leads me to the topic of toll roads. This is simply the government shirking one of it’s most basic functions: building roads. Sure, they built a road (and a nice one at that), but why are they charging extra for something that we already pay for? What are taxes for if not for building roads, schools, and putting police on the streets? If the government can’t adequately provide roads for the number of people in an area, then they need to cut spending elsewhere in order to pay for it. It would be like an airline having a “seat” surcharge and charging you extra to sit in a seat on the flight (which may not be far off).
Why do we put up with this? Because we don’t think about taxes as money given to the government to provide services that benefit the common good. In fact, we don’t really think about taxes at all. That’s because they are taken out of our paycheck before we ever see them. It was a brilliant move on the government’s part to keep us from caring what they spend our money on. If you make a salary of 50k/year, you never really think about the fact that you really only see 35K/year ( source ). That means you pay $15,000 per year to the government and they can’t even build you the roads you need to get to work with that money. That’s just plain mismanagement and we are just letting them off the hook for it.
