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By Matt Kinnaman
Article Launched: 10/10/2008 10:33:02 AM EDT



Friday, October 10
Halloween came early on Capitol Hill this year, with tons of special-interest treats and pet projects bundled in the bailout, creating a very scary situation for taxpaying workers, entrepreneurs and everyday Main Street Americans.
The financial framework is crumbling, the Dow is tanking, but politics as usual has never been in better shape.

Under congressional oversight, the bailout bill, aka the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008," metastasized from three pages to 451. It now buries American taxpayers under mountains of new debt obligations while ladling goodies left and right.

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer got his in there. For seven years he has pushed uphill to get commuters' bicycles recognized as a worthy object of tax credits, via Blumenauer's Bike Commuter Act. Last week, he finally succeeded, when the Bike Commuter Act was squirreled away in the bailout bill, along with many other favored nuggets, including a production tax credit for wind energy, an investment tax credit for solar energy and a tax credit for the purchase of small wind turbines.

At precisely the moment when huge new American nuclear and carbon energy initiatives are required to meet the needs of humankind, Congress produced an economic rescue plan that includes getting more people to ride bikes to work. Didn't even communist countries realize long ago that this is no way to build the future?

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experiments of history notwithstanding, our lawmakers decided last week that if you ride your bike to work in 2009, you can be reimbursed up to $20 per month, tax-free, "for reasonable expenses incurred by the employee during such calendar year for the purchase of a bicycle and bicycle improvements, repair and storage, if such bicycle is regularly used for travel between the employee's residence and place of employment."
Tax incentives for the purchase, repair and storage of bikes? To meet our unprecedented economic challenges? Does this mean slower is better, and that slower with less gasoline burned is even better yet?

On the Interstate, at 65 mph, a driver moves 10 miles in just over nine minutes. If the speed limit is reduced to 55 mph, as some congressmen have recently proposed, the 10-mile Interstate drive would take almost 11 minutes. And a now-tax-incentivized 10-mile bicycle commute to work, at an average speed of 15 miles per hour, takes 40 minutes.

Another Oregonian, scientist Dr. Noah Robinson, presented a recent analysis of the economic impact of commuting at slower speeds:

"Assuming an increased fuel efficiency of 10 percent in slowing from 65 to 55 and $3.30 for regular gas, this works out -- for an American driving an 18 mile-per-gallon SUV -- to a savings of $5.78 per hour for the extra driving time -- which is lower than the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour. If, however, one drives a fuel-efficient automobile getting 35 miles per gallon, the savings is only $3.06 per hour, less than half the federal minimum wage. Moreover, assuming the same amount of travel, the roads would be 18 percent more crowded. So, the 55 mile-per-hour proposal would require Americans to spend 18 percent more time in highway driving, at savings below the minimum wage for that extra time."

Continuing the reasoning, it's easy enough to figure out that, in the economics of bicycling to work, if the cyclist left his 18 mile-per-gallon SUV in the garage, he would save $1.83 in gas expenses during his 10-mile, 40-minute commute. Then again, if he was previously ozone-conscious and had purchased a 46-mile-per-gallon Prius instead of a Yukon, his 10-mile bike ride would save him only 72 cents in gas purchases. But his losses would negate his gains. Even on secondary roads, where car travel averages only 30 miles per hour, the minimum wage-earning 15 mph bicycle commuter actually loses at least 19 percent more in lost wage-earning time than what he gains in fuel savings.

When extrapolated across the human landscape, incentivizing slower commutes creates a net negative economic effect due to lost earning potential, lost productivity and lower GDP, which means less earnings, less food, less shelter, fewer human services, less charity and lower tax revenues.

During the Democratic National Convention, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana exulted that "Barack Obama understands the most important barrel of oil is the one that you don't use!" Congress, rapidly increasing socialist-structured debt while incentivizing the slowing of individual enterprise, evidently agrees.

It is only the entire historical narrative of human progress that refutes them.

Matt Kinnaman of Lee writes his column every week for the Transcript.