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March 24, 1999, Wednesday, Final Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A26

LENGTH: 445 words

HEADLINE: The Aviation Money Grab

BODY:

HOUSE TRANSPORTATION and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster is asking his colleagues to do for aviation what isn't done for education, veterans' benefits, environmental protection, even national defense: Grant it a bye from budget constraints. He did the same thing last year in behalf of highways, and won. The highway system will be better funded in the future, but at the expense of the rest of government and the rational annual allocation of available funds. It's hard to say no to the giant public works bills Mr. Shuster offers if only the members will ease the rules. But the price of easing is higher than the salesman smoothly suggests. Last year is spilled milk; this year Congress should say no. The chairman wants to put the aviation trust fund off budget. The goal is a system in which, as a practical matter, all the money coming into the fund each year from aviation taxes would automatically be spent on airport improvements and air-traffic control without serious reference to either fiscal considerations or other possible governmental needs. Only fair, Mr. Shuster says; after all, that's what the taxes are ostensibly for. But then he wants a guaranteed amount of general revenues as well.

Part of the rationale is that in some years not all the revenues have been spent for aviation purposes, with the result that a balance of what Mr. Shuster regards as money owed to aviation has built up in the trust fund. But the trust fund is an accounting convention, not the sacred obligation the chairman and the industry for which he is fronting find it convenient to pretend. In recent years more total money has been spent on aviation than has been collected in aviation taxes.

The congressman and industry are right that there is a need for increased spending on the air transportation system. But the Balkanization of the budget and power shifts in favor of the congressional transportation committees that they propose are not the way to provide it. There are lots of needs for increased spending. Congress should acknowledge them, in a way it has not in the pending budget resolutions.

Were it to do so, it would be forced to acknowledge as well that the budget is tighter than the current visions of sugar plums suggest. The tax cut Mr. Shuster's party is proposing will strand most domestic functions of government once funds are set aside for Social Security and the increase contemplated for defense. Mr. Shuster blithely proposes that, like highways, aviation be exempted from the scramble for sustenance that will ensue. Let the rest of government bear the burden. That's not the right solution to this problem.

LOAD-DATE: March 24, 1999