Watch Out: Election Year TTC Propaganda?

Remember back in 2000, when Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn was gushing about rosy predictions for a state surplus in hopes of helping get George W. Bush elected president…and that the bottom fell out and hell broke out later because those predictions were wrong (perhaps, purposly inflated?)

As Bush learned, it’s great being governor, because you can get any state agency to spit out whatever number you want them to as easy as you can find a pigeon who’ll crap on your car outside the Capitol.

Rick Perry is evidently taking a page from the Bush Playbook this week, as the Texas Department of Transportation has come out with the totally dire prediction that, without the Trans Texas Corridor’s toll roads, the state would need a 17 cent gas tax hike.

Why is this figure suspicious. Typically, when the media uses phrases like “that estimate dwarfs an earlier figure” you wonder if someone did their math wrong or if someone is using math simply to do wrong.
Here’s what the Statesman noted:

It would take a local gasoline tax of about 17 cents a gallon to replace the money brought in by a controversial second round of toll roads, the Texas Department of Transportation says in an analysis released Monday.

[...]

This latest calculation takes into account the lost profits from the toll roads over the next four decades, as well as a (hypothetical) $2 billion bond sale in 2048 to build more roads or rail projects, a borrowing that would be supported by the tollway profits still further in the future. That amounts to about $4.4 billion in revenue that would have to be matched by a gas tax, according to the analysis.

Oh, well. That settles it. Profits over the next four decades. So, if God doesn’t smote the state of Texas off the earth before then for idiocies like the Trans Texas Corridor, too many coal power plants and the fact that Kinky Friedman actually ran for governor, the TTC will still have cost more than it was worth.