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Bicycling to benefit from the $700B bailout bill
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Politics (and bicycling) makes strange bedfellows. Which reminds me, have you ever wondered what a bedfellow is? Either a temporary associate or a person with whom one shares a bed, according to The Free Dictionary. Politics normally has as much to do with bicycling as bowling does with Shakespeare (no insult to bowlers or the Bard intended). But a delicious example of ear-mark irony played out a few weeks ago when the House of Reps first denied the federal bailout bill, then turned around and resoundingly approved it a few days later. The fact that this political theater codified a favorable bicycle commuting provision that had been kicking around DC for seven years gives even the most timid cycling examiner an opportunity for political pontification.
It seems that a 2-wheel commuting advocate from Oregon, Representative Earl Blumenauer, has for more than seven years been promoting a bill to provide tax credits to companies that facilitate bike commuting. The stunning lack of success this bill reliably garnered could easily have earned it the moniker “Bill to Nowhere”. Were it not for the bone-headedness of our Wall Street brethren, this bill would still be languishing somewhere behind efforts to have schools adopt “the earth was created flat” curricula. Luckily, our economic meltdown gave the commuter bill the opportunity it needed to be considered on its merits.
As you recall, the House initially voted down the $700B bailout bill. The shock to the stock market was instantaneous, prodding the Senate to cast about for some mechanism to insure that a second vote in the House would be successful. As we’ve all learned, when it comes to creating legislation in the USA, Pork Primes the Pump. So our intrepid Senators larded up H.R. 1424 with provisions selected expressly to convince certain Representatives to change their votes from Nay to Yea. Rep. Blumenauer had originally voted against the bill, so the good Senators figured they could flip him by including one of his pet projects, the bike commuting bill, in the bailout package. In an ending befitting an O. Henry story, Rep. Blumenauer saw his long-sought dream enacted into law, even as he, acting totally on principle we are told, cast his vote against it. Extruding the irony even further, one of the presidential candidates, who has made a solemn pledge that he would veto any act that had any semblance of attached pork, cast his own vote for the Senate version of this pork-laden bill.
Political shenanigans aside, the bill is meant to encourage companies to provide up to $20 a month in tax deductions per bike commuter for providing bike parking facilities, shower facilities, maintenance assistance etc. Details of how this program will work are still being worked out by the IRS. $20 is somewhat less than $700B, but the fact that the tax code now rewards companies for encouraging bicycle transport is surely a positive step.
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