Fall Regulation Looks at Paperwork, Public–Private Partnerships, and Financial Reporting
Unnecessary red tape erodes faith in government and democratic processes. The problems caused by duplicative, excessive, and poorly understood information collection requirements hurt constituencies that support both major parties. In the fall issue of Regulation, Stuart Shapiro discussed revising and improving the Paperwork Reduction Act. Also in this issue, Eduardo Engel, Ronald Fischer, and Alexander Galetovic evaluate thirty years of public–private partnerships, and Ike Brannon and Robert Jennings consider how investors and corporations could benefit from less frequent financial reporting.
Transit: The Urban Parasite
The costs of supporting the nation’s urban transit industry are rising, yet ridership is declining. In all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average automobile. Transit no longer serves large numbers of low‐income people, as most of them have purchased automobiles. Transit systems with declining ridership do little or nothing to relieve urban congestion; nearly empty buses often increase congestion. For all these reasons, says Cato scholar Randal O’Toole, it is time to end subsidies to transit and consider privatizing it instead.