Taxpayers have been asking their public officials for decades to improve the infrastructure and transportation services they rely on. They’ve been met with plans to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on high-speed rail systems that won’t help, and highway expansions that never materialize. This knee-jerk response to our infrastructure problem is both unhelpful and unrealistic, for two reasons. First, politicians can’t deliver the ‘shovel-ready’ projects they promise. By presiding over a system of crony capitalism and endless paperwork, permit approvals and lawsuits, they simply cannot deliver high quality fixes at an affordable cost. Second, government seems to be ignoring the role of information technology in easing the burden on parents and workers to commute. The role of email in removing the need to commute to the post office is just one example of how technology improves our lives. Government policy should favor such behavior. I want to award tax breaks to businesses that allow their employees to ‘telework’ from home, and to companies that make their in-store products available for online purchase. Rather than having a tax system that discourages people from running businesses from their own homes, there should be tax incentives for doing so. Reducing the need for millions of Americans to spend hours each day on the road will both improve their quality of life and put less pressure on the infrastructure we already have. That will make it easier and cheaper to focus on fixing roads, improving public transportation and reducing traffic.
What has Brad Sherman done? He boasts of having secured federal funds to reduce traffic congestion, and of having personally improved the Valley’s infrastructure problem. Has he? A recent Los Angeles 2020 Commission report found that traffic congestion, despite multibillion-dollar initiatives, is getting significantly worse.
