1. What is the enforcement mechanism for your congestion rationing plan? This is an extremely important if it is to be a reasonable alternative to congestion pricing. Otherwise, it is just a red herring.

2. How is this a social injustice? Several public goods are currently being given away gratis to private interests and the community as a whole are paying to social, economic and health costs. Those public goods include air and public space. Making them pay for their damage with their payments going towards promoting a shared social good, transit.

3. You are condemning the (superficial) regressive nature of the congestion charge, but how would you address the even greater regressive nature of car ownership and operation? The price of owning and operating a vehicle is highly discriminatory against the poor. Without changing this fact, wouldn't any attempts to implement a less "regressive" system be pointless? Are you suggesting that we should subsidize automobile and fuel purchases as well?

4. Do you agree that by subsidizing automobile use, we are indirectly subsidizing the oil and automobile industries?

5. Do you think that the tax increase required to support transit's operational and capital budgets could actually realistically occur in the City given the political reality that exists? If not, then where would the funding for mass transit come from?

Excessive elaboration on this is premature; I would have to think about it more than I currently have. Suffice it to say that I don't think this is a significant impediment to congestion rationing.

Yet one of the big criticisms of the mayor's congestion pricing proposal is that he hasn't worked out all of the details yet. Interesting...

Reissuing licenses would not work because motor vehicle licensing is done at the state level. It would be highly unlikely that New York would be able to convince the other state to reissue licenses to work with the program. New York cannot discriminate against drivers from states that do not participate because of the interstate commerce clause. This would lead to a regressive situation in which more wealthy people would be able to get out of state driver's licenses by having a second home.

Jack and Chris, licenses would be reissued in conjuction with surname, and a criminal penalty would have to be applied to people who drove on prohibited days. Excessive elaboration on this is premature; I would have to think about it more than I currently have. Suffice it to say that I don't think this is a significant impediment to congestion rationing.

Chris, I initially asked why progressives would support something that appears to be a blatant Trojan Horse, the precedential value of which could have incredibly deleterious consequences for social justice. You answered that quite well in your final post, and it is clear that at least some progressives are going in with eyes open. We have probably reached a point where our prognostications of the future are simply going to differ. I think that the market-teers and privatizers are going to use this, if it occurs, as precedent for a massive increase in "value pricing" for everything. I note that, in England, for example, the London congestion charge has been cited as precedent for a nation-wide road pricing scheme. That said, I respect your perspective.

I will say this; we didn't arrive at this point accidentally. As recently as 1979, the top federal income tax rate was 70%, and in 1954 it was 91%. American attitudes about income inequality were drastically different then, too. Libertarians and conservatives tried to change those attitudes for 50 years prior, but were unsuccesful, until the neoliberals began agreeing with them. If neoliberals had not attacked the Democratic party from within (the DLC "bargain with business"), government funding wouldn't be an issue, and the rampant income and opportunity inequality we currently have would not exist. The neoliberals stabbed progressives in the back not globally, but issue-by-issue, agreeing with conservatives' fallacous premises but claiming that they could do things more effeciently ("good government"). Conversely, however, by agreeing with conservative premises (support for the market, rejection of unions, teacher blaming, etc.) neoliberals have caused an overwhelming lack of faith in government. I believe that practice manfests itself in this situation by the casual acceptance of technocratic economists' assertions of the "effeciency" of regressive value procing, while ignoring (or minimizing) its regressive and unjust tendencies. In other words, I reject the notion that we can only fight environmental problems with the tools given to us by economists. It is tragic that progressives have shied away from addressing environmental and QOL problems with tools found in the toolkit of social justice.

This "tax" nonsense is just a convenient talking point, meant to raise the hackles of everyone who hates excessive taxation, ie. everyone.

And you still haven't answered a very important part of your proposal: if we have congestion rationing enacted by using surnames, how in the world are you going to enforce that? The only way that I can see such a system being enforced is if it's by license plate number instead, and we've gone over many times that it favors the rich more than congestion pricing ever would.

You never answered the question on how rationing would be enforced at the driver level. At the license plate level it is at least feasible. Please, tell us how it you would enforce it.

Secondly, I also find the structural adjustment programs and privatization ideology of the world bank and IMF morally repugnant. But the question is why. Take the example of the Cochabamba water privatization. The issue there, at least as I see it, was that a publicly owned utility was being sold off to the highest bidder. That private company was going to raise the price of water to about one quarter of the wage of the average worker. It also involved the monopoly on all water supply, including rainwater collection. That is the price of a necessary resource for all people were raised to be beyond the means of most people, all in the name of financial stabilization.

New York's streets are different. The resource in question is transportation. Unlike water in Cochabamba, transportation can come from a variety of sources be it car, bike, train, bus, ferry etc. Charging to drive in Manhattan does not reduce someone's access to transportation generally, just a particular mode. Moreover, the roads are not being privatized, they are still in public hands and still subject to public scrutiny and control, something you do not get with privatization (especially when it occurs in third world countries).

Right now, all New Yorkers are paying to subsidize car travel, on one level or another despite the fact that about 50% of households do not own a car (the figure is 75% in Manhattan). This includes the NYCDOT capital program, NYPD traffic enforcement, snow removal, street cleaning, etc. I personally do not have a problem with subsidizing something as long it is something that should be encouraged: Health care, Education, and Mass Transit, for example. Private automobiles, on the other hand, do tremendous damage to the environment, public health, and communities, especially in a city environment. We should not encourage this behavior and in fact we should discourage it.

Also, I have a very hard time with your argument that the congestion charge is regressive. Automobile ownership itself is a regressive cost. Many of the costs of owning and operating a vehicle are fixed or at least not progressive. Do most auto mechanics give a discount based on income? Is gas cheaper? Is insurance progressively tied to income? Again, you complain about the congestion charge being regressive at $2,000 per year yet you ignore the $6,000 a year average cost of ownership for a car. Honestly, if you want to look at regressive nature, don't just look at the government percentage, look at the big picture. Do you think that the government should give away free cars to everyone, fill their tanks and pay their maintenance bills? If not, you are ignoring a much larger regressive cost.

Also, by subsidizing roads, you are giving away to large, multinational corporations. By making driving roads free, you are encouraging people to waste more gas and buy more cars, increasing the revenue of such lovely institutions as Shell, Exxon and GM.

I do not agree with the free market fanatics that the market "knows" best (a truly free market is pretty much impossible with collusion and how can the market know anything, it is a model used for understanding economics, not a sentient being), but I think that markets can be a useful and important tool of public policy. A free good has the tendency of overuse (or at least excessive use). While I would not be opposed to this for lets say, health care or education, as I said before, we do not want to encourage people to drive.

You want to address the regressive nature of our current economic system, fine I'm with you with that, but this is a terrible place to start. By improving transit, congestion pricing will actually reduce the regressive nature of transportation by transferring funds from a hopelessly regressive mode, cars, to a much more egalitarian one, transit in that it will improve service and hold fares in check.

Finally, I think that we need to face reality here. We can talk all day about making a system that is perfectly fair to everyone, but with the economic reality that we live in, this is not possible. New York City is not going to become a communist utopia (and I do not mean this a pejorative, I just mean that as what it seems you are describing) any time in the foreseeable future. Any changes the basic economic system needs to be done at a much larger level to be effective. If personal income tax is driven too high in the city, people will move out and the city will be in dire economic straits and the transit system, which is, again used by almost all the poor in New York, will suffer, just like it did with the 1970s financial crisis. If you want to raise the progressive income tax significantly, you really need to do it at the national level, not at the state and certainly not at the city level. You need to acknowledge the reality that conservatives and moderates live in the city too and that you will never, in the foreseeable future get a huge tax increase that would be necessary to support both free transit and transit capital program. Do you really think otherwise? Please, tell me that it would be feasible in the political reality that we live in.

So left with the choice of the status quo, which unfairly subsidizes drivers, who are on average 33% poorer than the average transit user in New York, and encourages them to drive excessively which pollutes the air, kills pedestrians, takes up public space, etc. versus a system (congestion pricing), while superficially regressive, benefits the poor more than the status quo and is politically feasible, I think that congestion pricing is a more equitable solution. It will make a better city and a better world in general and I would rather have that than have the status quo and remain self-righteous.

You never answered the question on how rationing would be enforced at the driver level. At the license plate level it is at least feasible. Please, tell us how it you would enforce it.

Secondly, I also find the structural adjustment programs and privatization ideology of the world bank and IMF morally repugnant. But the question is why. Take the example of the Cochabamba water privatization. The issue there, at least as I see it, was that

Jack, if there are two people trying to move pianos, and one person can afford the charge better than the other one can, appropriating the public streets to the wealthier user is unfair. If you want to reduce traffic, there are going to be hardships; those hardships can either be bourne by everyone equally, or primarily by the less wealthy. Enforcing congestion rationing by name simply requires license-days to be issued by family/name, and some short term cross-referencing to root out people who attempt to evade the system. Do you understand that allowing one to buy one's way out of a system inherently favors the wealthy?

HE, your arguments don't make sense. If you want to limit access to resources, you favor rationing of some form. The two we have been discussing are queue rationing and price rationing. Price rationing favors the wealthy at the expense of the poor, while queue rationing favors nobody. You seem to favor allowing wealthy people with doctors' appointments access to the public streets, but not less wealthy. That is regressive, not progressive.

Subway fare is a regressive tax/user fee. Mass transit should be paid for by a progressive income tax. Taxi fare is not a tax, unless the taxis are owned by the City.

Stu, the precedential value of this plan alone is far more deleterious than the current $8 charge. That's why the Bush administration is willing to pay $500 million dollars for it.

And a fine relative to a person's income is definitely unconstitutional. The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, not the perpetrator's wallet. Is it more heinous for a rich man to speed than a poor person?

That being said, he and other opponents of congestion pricing are focusing too much on the $8 as some sort of social injustice. Yes, it will be hard on some people, but guess what? Sometimes the benefits to the many outweigh the inconvenience of the few. We should have compassion for those for whom this charge will be a hardship, but the plan is not set in stone. It can be adjusted to accommodate the poor, just as discount MetroCards are available for students and the elderly. It's not hard to envision discounts for those who can't always take transit, such as the handicapped. The plan is not set in stone.

Still, I find it hard to believe that eight bucks in and of itself violates the ideals of progressive social justice. What about the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that some families spend to treat asthma in their children? What is socially progressive about traffic that makes buses so slow that it takes an hour for an elderly or handicapped person to cross town at 34th Street? What is socially progressive about traffic so thick that we have to open city parks to cars during rush hours?

Yes, David, if you narrowly focus on $8 coming out of someone's wallet then you might be right. But you are wrong to call this a tax. It is a fee for a service that has so far been free. Is the subway fare a tax? Is cab fare a tax?

Second, Jack, the 8th amendment does not prohibit steep fines. If the amendment does not prohibit 20 year prison sentences for passing checks with insufficient funds, then steep fines are fine. Plus, the fact that such a thing occurs in Finland would make it more likely to be considered acceptable under 8th amendment jurisprudence. Maybe the 8th amendment should be beefed up somewhat, but that's a different story (for a different blog)

Dave, a consumption tax is antithetical to the several fundamental premises of progressive social justice. First of all, progressive incomes taxes can eliminate inequality of income, while consumption taxes cannot. Second, consumption taxes are regressive. Third, consumption taxes ignore "wealth effects;" they allow untaxed wealth to be passed from generation to generation, allowing successive generations to have a signficant advantage in all economic competitions ("an unequal playing field"). Progressive income taxes allow government to amelieorate some of those "wealth effects" by tranferring wealth from families to the state, regardless of whether it was spent or saved. Fourth, consmuption taxes are another step in the direction of pushing the state away from worrying about production, and in the direction of merely attempting to counter secondary effects of injustice. For example, all other things being held constant, it would be positive for government to tax income earned by consultants (whose suggestions usually involving overseas outsourcing, downsizing, or other socially unjust methods of production enhancement) at an higher rate than income earned by librarians or teachers. Blind income taxes (such as our current tax) don't do that, but consumption taxes take production out of the equation entirely. Traditional economists think that by shouting loud enough with their fingers in their ears, they can force society to simply ignore behavior during production and focus solely on behavior during consumption. Witness how they ignore non-traditional economics at places like Notre Dame! They have been wildly successful so far, because progressives have been too timid to challenge them. Its time for that to stop.

Stu, you raise an itneresting point that should be addressed in any implementation of queue rationing. Ride sharing is positive, at least compared with solo drivers. I would have no problem completely banning solo drivers from the City. Registering a car in your spouse's name, though, would be easy to detect, and easy to deter.

Also, why do you feel that it is progressive to tax people based on what they earn versus what they consume?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax