It has been 800 years since English barons negotiated a written peace agreement with King John. The original June 1215 agreement was revised and reissued numerous times, with the 1217 version gaining the title Magna Carta (“Great Charter”). Over the centuries, the document has had a powerful influence of the evolving British legal system and government.

I’ve argued that the centralization of government spending in Washington over the past century has severely undermined good governance. Citizens get worse outcomes when funding and decisionmaking for education, infrastructure, and other things are made by the central government rather than state and local governments and the private sector. The problem is the same in the European Union, as a new article in Bloomberg on the funding of Polish airports illustrates:

Across my desk this morning: James Bennett’s new book, Corporate Welfare: Crony Capitalism That Enriches the Rich.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a fascinating hearing on Wednesday regarding air traffic control (ATC). The hearing showcased the momentum to proceed with ATC restructuring. Because aviation is crucial to the economy, such a reform would create wide-ranging benefits.

On large and complex government projects, costs will double from the original estimates. This tendency is called Edwards’ Law of Cost Doubling.The Wall Street Journal reports on the PATH rail station at the World Trade Center. Edwards’ Law was in effect:

Congress has created an ongoing crisis in the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). Year after year, policymakers spend more on highway and transit aid to the states than the HTF raises from gas taxes and other dedicated revenues. CBO projects that annual HTF spending will be $53 billion and rising in coming years, while HTF revenues will be $40 billion. That leaves an annual funding gap of at least $13 billion.

Government spending on highways and streets (light blue) and transportation (brown) have been roughly flat the past five years after surging the prior five years. It is spending on education (dark blue) that has plunged, and which has dragged down overall government construction spending. I don’t know why construction on schools and colleges soared and then plunged, but that is the main cause of the recent downward trend in public construction, not any form of transportation.

In the wake of the terrible train crash near Philadelphia, people are asking whether Amtrak budget cuts could have been a contributing factor. The short answer is that federal rail spending has not been cut. The longer answer is that rail spending has been greatly misallocated by Congress. Rather than being spent on maintenance along heavily used corridors (particularly in the Northeast), the federal rail budget has been frittered away on uneconomical rural routes and high-speed rail schemes.

According to opinion polls, Americans think the federal government is too big and too powerful. On average, people think that more than half of the tax dollars sent to Washington are wasted. When Gallup asked people what the most important problem facing the nation was, more people identified “government” than any other concern, including the economy, immigration, health care, and terrorism.

The federal government runs more than 2,300 subsidy programs. One of the problems created by the armada of hand-outs is that many programs work at cross-purposes.