The Road to Fiscal Hell

From Stephen Moore's column in The Wall Street Journal:

Without the drilling money the bill elevates fiscal accounting hocus pocus to new heights. For example, it pays for 27 months of road funding with 10 years of budget savings and revenue measures. Isn't that exactly the trick ObamaCare used for financing and that Republicans denounced? As Marc Scribner, transportation expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes, "this just makes the funding problem even worse two years from now when a new highway bill has to be passed. It's just a bunch of phony pay fors."

Highway bills are supposed to be financed with gas tax money, but because Congress wanted to spend so much more than is collected and didn't want to cut spending or raise the gas tax, Mr. Scribner calculates that the bill is a $20 billion raid on the general fund (which is $1.2 trillion in deficit) to pay for the spending programs.