Link to article here.

One has to wonder, if proposals to increase toll rates based on inflation and to index the gas tax to inflation which is so overtly manipulated by the government, do we have any business supporting these policies? What will happen to these toll roads propped up with billions in leveraged debt if retirees demand an end to inflation manipulation to steady the dollar and their Social Security paychecks causing massive toll tax or gas tax increases (like the 281 toll rates tied to the consumer price index or CPI and proposals to index the gas tax to inflation)? We must demand a return to sound financial policy in this country or risk bankrupting us all.

View Congressman and Presidential candidate Ron Paul chiding the Fed for stealing seniors’ money on YouTube.

Expert says feds stealing half of seniors’ paychecks
Contends government manipulating data to keep cost-of-living index low
November 8, 2007
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

The Social Security payments Americans receive in the mail are roughly half of what they would be if the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index honestly, a veteran econometrician told WND.
John Williams contends the U.S. government statistics intentionally understate inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI.

By understating CPI data, Williams argued, government officials are able to avoid increases in Social Security payments that are mandated by law as “cost of living adjustments.”

Williams maintains a website called Shadow Government Statistics that is dedicated to examine “analysis behind and beyond government economic reporting.”

In an analysis of the CPI, Williams contends the index is understated by roughly 7 percent per year by government intentionally manipulating the data.

Many of the CPI manipulations, Williams asserts, were masterminded by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman from 1987, under President Reagan, to 2006, under President Bush.

Williams points out that one of Greenspan’s manipulations of the CPI involved the consideration that when steak got too expensive, the consumer would substitute hamburger for the steak. So, Greenspan argued, the inflation measure should reflect the costs of buying hamburger, not steak.

“Of course, replacing hamburger for steak in the calculations would reduce the inflation rate,” Williams commented, “but it represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a declining standard of living. Cost of living was being replaced by the cost of survival.”

Williams noted the old system “told you how much you had to increase your income in order to keep buying steak. The new system promised you hamburger and then dog food, perhaps, after that.”

Williams concluded Greenspan’s arguments violated the “intent and common usage of the inflation index.”

“The CPI was considered sacrosanct within the Department of Labor, given the number of contractual relationships that were anchored to it,” Williams wrote. “The CPI was one number that never was to be revised, given its widespread usage.”

The Consumer Price Index is the central statistic the federal government uses to calculate inflation.

The CPI is a complex government statistic that was introduced in the 1920s to track the market cost of a “basket of goods and services.”

Beginning in the Carter administration, federal economists have cleverly redefined the CPI, with the goal of removing from the index expensive items, including food and energy, that would push the it higher.

Today, when setting interest rates, the Federal Reserve focuses on a variation of the CPI that measures “core inflation.”

The government’s calculation of core inflation now excludes items such as food and energy, because food and energy “face volatile price movements.”

In other words, since food and energy prices can spike, as they have this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates “core inflation” without them. The rationale is that the price shocks are temporary and, therefore, would distort the measurement of underlying long-term inflation.

To a family faced with paying rising food and gas prices, however, “core inflation” at 2 percent does not reflect the cost of living.

Other items also can be thrown out of the CPI market basket if their price spikes under the premise that the big price changes reflect passing market disequilibrium that would distort the measurement of long-term trends.

Williams says the inflation rate is further deflated by changing “weighted factors” used in the index.

He estimates the true inflation rate in the U.S. would be close to 11 or 12 percent if the CPI were not manipulated.

The results of this under-reporting are dramatic, with the compounding effect just since the early 1990s of reducing annual cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security so that today’s checks are roughly half what they would be if the CPI were reported honestly, according to the standards of the 1980s.

Greenspan’s recently released autobiographical book, “The Age of Turbulence,” openly admits the political influences behind the calculation of inflation.

He notes President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, even though the rate of inflation then was less than 5 percent.

Greenspan argues that the 4.5 percent inflation the U.S. experienced for the half century since abandonment of the gold standard may become the norm, with the consequence that saved dollars will lose half of their purchasing power in about 15 years.

At the height of the gold standard between 1870 and 1913, just prior to World War I, Greenspan correctly notes that the cost of living as calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York rose only 0.2 percent annually.

The dilemma the Fed faces is that under the U.S. fiat currency system, to keep inflation low it must keep interest rates high.

“Yet to keep the inflation rate down to a gold standard level of under 1 percent, or even a less draconian 1 to 2 percent range,” Greenspan wrote, “the Fed, given my scenario, would have to constrain monetary expansion so drastically that it could temporarily drive up interest rates into the double-digit range not seen since the days of Paul Volcker.”

High interest rates constrict the money supply, make borrowing difficult and generally depress economic growth.

During his term, Greenspan justified 1 percent interest rates, which in 2003 were the lowest rates in 45 years, in a determined plan to keep the economy growing.

Williams argued, however, that the result has been to fuel real inflation.

Link to article here.

We welcome Senator Dan Patrick to the growing number of elected officials (read more here) who object to TxDOT using taxpayer money to wage a propaganda campaign to push wildly controversial toll roads and the Trans Texas Corridor. Senator Patrick is also a well-known talk radio show host in Houston who took offense to TxDOT’s marketing gurus calling talk show hosts “pigs.”

Lawmakers take aim at transportation department’s advertising
The Associated Press
Nov. 3, 2007
AUSTIN — Two state lawmakers are requesting formal inquiries into whether the Texas Department of Transportation is improperly spending money on advertising.

Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, and Rep. Ken Paxton, R-McKinney, question whether an estimated $7 million to $9 million TxDOT is spending on its “Keep Texas Moving” campaign is a proper use of resources. The lawmakers have asked Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick look into the matter.

Paxton said he is concerned that the transportation department is spending the money to argue its case before the public in response to lawmakers’ questions about projects such as tollways and the Trans-Texas Corridor.

“We are potentially curtailing their ability to do tollways and maybe push forward the Trans-Texas Corridor,” Paxton said. “It appears that now they are trying to lobby the public to be favorable towards these particular issues, and I’m not sure that’s a really good use of taxpayer money.”

A TxDOT spokesman said the advertising campaign is legal and done in response to demands from lawmakers and the public for more information.

“We will not solve the transportation challenges facing Texas without public involvement and public input,” spokesman Randall Dillard said.

Patrick said he is worried TxDot has overstepped its role by lobbying for public support.

“My concern is that Texas agencies, including TxDOT, have exceeded the proper role of state government and, potentially, their legal authority provided by state law,” Patrick wrote in a letter to Dewhurst.

For fiscal year 2008, state agencies are expected to spend about $100 million for advertising, publications and promotional items, according to the state comptroller’s office. All state agencies together spent $97.8 million in 2006 and $93.3 million in 2007.

Link to article here. Gas prices are cited as part of the reason for less consumer spending. Sen. Sam Brownback had better worry more about billions in bankrupt toll roads instead of another quick fix for the Christmas shopping season.

Fed Chief Warns of Worse Times in the Economy

Doug Mills/ The New York Times

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke sits at the witness table as he prepares to testify regarding the economic fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis, on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007.

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
New York Times
November 9, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 — Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress on Thursday that the economy was going to get worse before it got better, a message that received a chilly reception from both Wall Street and politicians.

On a day when stock prices swung wildly, the dollar hit another new low against the euro and further signs emerged from retailers that consumers are growing more cautious about spending, Mr. Bernanke warned that the economy was about to “slow noticeably” as the housing market continues to spiral downward and financial institutions tighten up on lending.

But in a disappointment to investors, Mr. Bernanke offered no signal that the central bank might soften the blow by lowering interest rates for a third time this year at its next policy meeting on Dec. 11.

Share prices, which plunged on Wednesday, went on a roller coaster after Mr. Bernanke testified. The Dow Jones industrial average first fell 205 points by midafternoon, but then clawed back most of the way and ended the day at 13,266.29, down just 34 points.

Testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, the Fed chairman said that the two rate cuts in September and October should be enough to keep the economy from slipping into a recession. Without being specific, he reinforced statements by other Fed policy makers that the economy would have to show signs of stalling out entirely before they would reduce rates again.

Asked if he saw any risks of a recession, Mr. Bernanke demurred. “We have not calculated the probability of a recession,” he responded. “Our assessment is for slower growth, but positive.”

The Fed chairman’s stance was similar to that of Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary. In a meeting Thursday with editors and reporters of The New York Times, Mr. Paulson predicted that the crisis in mortgage and credit markets would hurt growth but not lead to a recession.

“I believe we will continue to grow,” Mr. Paulson said. “We have a diversified economy.”

Mr. Bernanke’s message did not sit well with Wall Street analysts, who quickly criticized him for ignoring the real risk of a serious downturn. And at least one Republican, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, begged him at length to cut rates as soon as possible.

But Fed officials are far from persuaded of the need, even though some now expect economic growth to slow to an annual pace of 1.5 percent or less in the final months of this year — a drastic downshift from the rapid pace of almost 4 percent this summer.

Mr. Bernanke offered a rocky outlook for the months ahead. He said the battered housing market had yet to hit bottom, that delinquencies and foreclosures were likely to rise and that the depression in home-building was “likely to intensify.” He predicted that personal spending would advance more slowly, because consumers were less confident and because of tighter credit conditions.

On top of all that, he said, “further sharp increases in crude oil prices have put renewed upward pressure on inflation and may impose further restraint on economic activity.” Oil traded just above $95 a barrel on Thursday, down slightly from the day before but still near its recent record highs.

Despite all these worrying signs, Mr. Bernanke noted that the economic data since the Fed reduced interest rates last week “continued to suggest that the overall economy remained resilient in recent months.”

“The cumulative easing of policy over the past two months should help forestall some of the adverse effects on the broader economy,” he said.

Wall Street analysts and anxious investors took little comfort in the chairman’s remarks.

“Mr. Bernanke gave no ground to the market’s desire for further easing,” wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y.

But Mr. Shepherdson and a number of other analysts predicted that the economy would slow much more than Mr. Bernanke expects and force the Fed’s hand.

Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics in London, predicted that the economy would be “stagnant at best” in the final quarter of this year.

“The only question is whether there is enough evidence of this slowdown available by mid-December — or whether we will have to wait until January for the next cut,” Mr. Ashworth wrote in a research note.

David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch’s chief economist for the United States, predicted that the housing market would not hit bottom by the end of next year. Noting that the Fed chairman said he would “act as needed,” Mr. Rosenberg said Mr. Bernanke had left the door open to more rate cuts.

At the hearing, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, urged Mr. Bernanke to act more aggressively to stimulate the economy. “I’m very concerned that there may be a bigger storm on the horizon,” he said.

But Mr. Bernanke refused to budge. Indeed, he referred first to the Fed’s attention to “price stability” and second to its interest in “sustainable growth.”

That did little to cheer lawmakers. In an early sign of the political pressure that the Fed is likely to face if the economy falters next year, Senator Brownback, who recently abandoned his Republican campaign for president, pleaded with Mr. Bernanke to cut rates in time for the Christmas shopping season.

“It seems to me that now is the time,” Mr. Brownback said. “When those gas prices get up to $3 a gallon, it seems to hit some sort of psychological point in consumer’s mind that ‘I have less to spend,’ and that’s a reality for them.”

Link to Letter to Editor here. TxDOT had to head all the way to Ohio to find an ally willing to attack the intelligence of a distinguished retired Colonel, Ken Allard. There’s nothing “snide” about shining some light on the corruption and total mismanagement at TxDOT. When our PUBLIC highway system is being hijacked by the road lobby for private interests at the taxpayers’ expense, it’s heroic not lacking intelligence, to speak up and demand accountability. Mr. Barnhart isn’t pointing out anything that hasn’t already been vehemently criticized, the Legislature’s raiding of gas tax funds and refusal to properly fund our public highway system.

Comment: Where’s the ‘intelligence’ in attack on TxDOT?
San Antonio Express-News
11/07/2007
The snide commentary on the Texas Department of Transportation by retired Col. Ken Allard, a former army intelligence officer, makes me wonder if those in his former profession were as cavalier in their analyses of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan as he has been in analyzing the factors leading to the highway funding crisis that Texans face (“Give TxDOT red light before it goes too far,” Oct. 18).

If so, it’s a wonder our military hasn’t been driven from the Middle East already! Thank God he’s retired and not directing our government’s policies today.

Fact I: In chastising TxDOT for its funding shortfall, I assume Allard feels it’s irrelevant that even though state motor fuel taxes generated $3.1 billion this year, the Legislature allowed TxDOT to use only $1.4 billion for road purposes.

Fact II: Apparently this former “intelligence officer” thinks it’s not important that despite TxDOT engineers calculating 20 years ago that overweight trucks were annually causing some $450 million in damage to the road system, for 18 years now the Legislature has, by law, required TxDOT to issue permits to truckers that allow them to exceed the legal axle and gross weight limits. That law has added more than $8 billion in damage to the road system, and there’s not a darned thing TxDOT or the Department of Public Safety can do to stop issuing those permits until the Legislature repeals that stupid law.

Fact III: The Texas Legislature has for years violated the state constitution (Article 8, Section 7a) by diverting billions of dedicated highway taxes to fund nonhighway projects, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Allard.

This year alone, more than $26 million was directed to aviation projects, almost a million to the Intercoastal Canal, more than $30 million for public transportation, $50 million to the Texas Education Association, plus $10 million to Health and Human Services, as well as more than a million to the Commission on Arts.

These are but the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and the diversions go on and on. The Texas Legislature writes the laws and TxDOT has no choice but to obey them.

Mr. Intelligence Officer, you sure owe TxDOT an apology.

Ray Barnhart, former administrator,

Federal Highway Administration;

former commissioner, Texas Department of Highways and Public Transportation; former member, Texas Turnpike Authority,

St. Clairsville, Ohio

Link to article here. None of these toll road decisions happen in a vacuum. They affect real people, businesses, and schools. We’ve said from the beginning that property values would be adversely impacted by converting 281 into a toll road (leaving only access roads as the free lanes). TxDOT’s refusal to install the gas tax FUNDED overpasses in 2003 up until the present has reaped devastating economic results: declining property values (and likely less money flowing to businesses), and less in tax receipts. What TxDOT is doing to real PEOPLE in this corridor is criminal!

The citizens were promised not only those overpasses, but the expansion of 281 and the addition of access roads since 2001. The gas tax money to do the improvements has been sitting in a TxDOT account since at least 2003, and it’s still there. The original plan: $100 million; the toll plan: over $400 million. So if TxDOT did the less invasive, abundantly more affordable gas tax plan, the $100 million that’s still in a TxDOT account can fix nearly 100% of the highway and keep it a FREEway. The citizens have been demanding that TxDOT install the gas tax funded plan IMMEDIATELY and stop tinkering with peoples’ lives and livelihoods! We don’t need tolls, we need overpasses. Demand the gas tax plan NOW!

Stone Oak real estate slowing
By Jennifer Hiller
Express-News
11/09/2007

People beat down the doors trying to buy real estate in Stone Oak just a year and a half ago.

Today, home sellers practically have to flag people down in the street and wave them into the driveway.

The hottest real estate markets in San Antonio can be found inside Loop 1604 instead.

Like many suburban areas, Stone Oak’s home sales have turned sluggish, partly thanks to increasing traffic and longer commute times.

Other factors include stiff competition from home builders and a wait-and-see attitude about where boundary lines will be drawn for the new high school in North East Independent School District.

Inside-1604 areas such as Churchill Estates, Olmos Park, Deerfield, Elm Creek, Monte Vista, San Pedro Hills, Alamo Heights, Shavano Park and Castle Hills are where homes have seen some of the highest price increases in the city since the start of 2005.

“These are all parts of our city where, because of transportation or congestion, there’s been an increase in interest,” said Travis Kessler, CEO of the San Antonio Board of Realtors.

Sally Romo, real estate agent with Bradfield Properties, said the congestion at U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 looms large in home buyers’ minds.

“There are a lot of people who won’t go up 281,” Romo said. “It takes a long time. I know people who would have moved up there and just didn’t want to face it. It’s definitely affecting sales. The farther you go north, the longer it takes to get home at night.”

It’s a stark reversal from the several years when home buyers couldn’t seem to get far enough outside Loop 1604.

And in 2006, North Side real estate sales benefited from something of an unnatural market force when North East ISD capped enrollment at Reagan High School. The district gave new residents an April 2006 deadline to buy a house or sign a contract, or their children would be sent to farther-away MacArthur High School.

In the first four months of 2006, about 1,100 Stone Oak-area homes sold or went under contract, and it was common for houses in good condition to go off the market within a few days. Buyer’s agents were vying to be the first to show a home and arrived with their clients — and a contract — in hand.

This year in the Multiple Listing Service area that includes Stone Oak and the east side of U.S. 281, it’s taking an average of 79 days to sell a home, up from 66 last year. Homes that sold in September were on the market an average of 115 days.

So is once-sizzling Stone Oak starting to fizzle?

It’s hardly that dramatic.

Romo points out this is a slow time of year for all real estate — Stone Oak and elsewhere. Buyers still consider the area highly desirable. And prices still are rising, just not in the way that drops jaws.

Since January 2005, average sales prices increased 9.6 percent in the area to reach $267,973.

Meanwhile, the average sales price for San Antonio as a whole rose 27 percent, reaching $184,257.

With the opening of the new Johnson High next fall, North East ISD is getting ready to redraw its boundaries again, and for now, no one knows which neighborhoods will feed into which high schools.

With school boundaries up in the air, Kessler and others say buyers have switched from hurry-up-and-buy panic to choosy moderation.

“I think until there’s a decision on that one, I think some people are waiting to decide where they will be,” Kessler said.

For now, there’s an overabundance of pre-owned and new homes for sale.

“Days on the market is doubling or tripling,” said Cheryl Atherton of Coldwell Banker D’Ann Harper Realtors. “Prices are softening. There are lots of expired and canceled listings.”

The new-home market has put particular pressure on sales of existing homes in suburbs, where buyers tend to either want a new home or a recently updated existing home. A house that requires significant elbow grease languishes on the market now, agents say.

Home builders who have excess inventory outside Loop 1604 are offering such deep discounts that the deals are proving too tempting for home buyers to pass up.

“They’re offering lots of incentives … that people who are selling their pre-owned home cannot match,” Romo said.

Jason Glast of the Phyllis Browning Co. said builders see a price cut as a business decision, but it’s emotional for homeowners.

“I just sold a $262,000 home, and the builder took $40,000 off the price like it was no big deal,” Glast said. “They wanted to get it done. The home builders are relatively sophisticated. It’s all business.”

Since the start of the summer, Glast even has turned down listings if he felt the sellers were unrealistic about their price.

There are other forces at work in the market, Atherton says.

Many potential sales are falling apart because buyers can’t sell homes in other markets.

“San Antonio’s economy is flourishing,” she said. “The buyers that are coming in can’t sell their house. If they can’t sell the house, guess what? They can’t qualify. We’re suffering a backlash.”

As for the traffic, which real estate professionals pinpoint as the biggest gripe of home buyers, Bob Gardner, owner of Gardner Financial Services, which makes loans under the name Legacy Mutual Mortgage, thinks the push to live inside Loop 1604 is more significant for areas along U.S. 281 than neighborhoods along other highways.

“I don’t see the same phenomenon on Interstate 10 and Loop 1604,” Gardner said.

Link to article here.

Toll road profits used on streets
$120 million to be spent on ‘connectivity’ projects next year
By RAD SALLEE
Houston Chronicle
November 8, 2007
Harris County will spend an unprecedented amount of its toll road profits next year to build and upgrade roads and streets, some of them miles from any toll booth.

Call it the third stage of evolution for the Harris County Toll Road Authority, an evolution driven by the struggle to survive.

When voters and County Judge Jon Lindsay began the toll road system in 1983, the idea was simple: We’ll build this road, and when it has paid for itself, we’ll make it a freeway.

As other toll roads followed, the tempting revenue stream begat another idea: When these are paid off, we’ll keep on tolling them and pool the money to build more toll roads.

Starting in 2001, Commissioners Court set aside $20 million paid by toll road users each year to build and improve roads and streets that connect to the tollway system. These annual allocations have helped build more than 80 such “connectivity” projects.

On Sept. 20, the court quietly boosted the annual connectivity allotment to $120 million — double the previous high of $60 million in 2004, and one-fourth of the tollway system’s net revenue.

The increase signals that toll road funds likely will be a major tool for general road building for the foreseeable future.

Despite their name, the funds increasingly have been spent on projects with no connections to toll roads and even on roads that provide an alternative to congested tollways.

A map of connectivity projects to date includes, for instance, improvements to a trucking route between Texas 146 and the Port of Houston docks at Barbour’s Cut, about seven miles from the East Sam Houston Tollway.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said a toll road connectivity project on Clay Road will help get people from fast-growing Katy prairie subdivisions to north-south arteries such as Fry Road. These connect to the Katy Freeway, and from there one can reach the tollways.

The county road system as a whole “feeds the toll roads,” Emmett said. “This will help complete the grid.”

As county Infrastructure Director Art Storey put it, “Today’s remote project is right in the middle of things tomorrow.”

Architect Christof Spieler of the grass-roots Citizens Transportation Coalition said he has no problem with using money paid by toll road users to build free roads.

But if government is providing new roads to access new subdivisions in the Katy Prairie, he said, it is making that housing artificially cheap.

Seed money

Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack said the money is greatly needed, as is more road capacity near fast-growing subdivisions on the prairie. Clay Road is one of the most congested in his precinct, he said.Radack noted that connectivity funds also can be used as seed money to attract private investment, as other county dollars were used in an $8 million project to extend Kingsland from the Grand Parkway (Texas 99) to Katy-Fort Bend Road at Katy Mills Mall.

The county is contributing $1.3 million of the Kingsland funding, Radack said. “The rest is private sector.”

Spieler said that, although he opposes suburban sprawl, he likes Radack’s idea of having developers — and ultimately the homebuyers — take on that cost.

Still, he said he would like to see more of the connectivity money used for “infill” projects in Houston and other municipalities. These retard sprawl, and often are more cost-efficient, he said, since the street, drainage and utility infrastructure already may be in place.

“The county spends hardly any of its road budget inside the city limit, although we in Houston pay the same county taxes,” Spieler said.

Emmett and Storey said the big increase in the connectivity budget stems in part from the county’s wrangling earlier in the year with the Texas Department of Transportation.

For the first time, TxDOT sought payment from the county for use of state rights of way for toll roads. TxDOT also put the entire state on notice that it lacks money to expand local roads — a situation unlikely to change soon.

“Some of these road projects would have been funded through the state in the past, but the state has told us they’re not going to spend any money,” Emmett said. “So, rather than us wait around and wring our hands, we said ‘nope, we’re going to get started.’ ”

Another reason for the increase, Storey said, was the decision county officials faced in 2005 over whether to sell, lease or hang onto the toll road system. Financial consultants had said it might bring $20 billion if sold.

Fateful decision

Commissioners decided to keep the asset and ensure that its revenues continue to be spent in Harris County. Even with the connectivity budget increase, Storey said, there will be enough revenue left to maintain the existing tollways and fund at least some of the six projects authorized by the Legislature this summer.These include extending the Sam Houston Tollway from the Eastex Freeway to U.S. 90, extending the Hardy Toll Road from Loop 610 to downtown, building high-occupancy toll lanes along Hempstead Highway and adding toll lanes to Texas 288.

A list of connectivity projects proposed for FY 2008-09, which begins March 1, was not available as Commissioners Court has not decided which will be built or how much each precinct will get.

Link to article here.

Technology Eases the Ride To Higher Tolls
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times
July 4, 2007

There is a stretch of the Garden State Parkway that used to feel like the tollbooth capital of America. In a span of 100 miles — from Pascack Valley, in northern New Jersey, to Barnegat, along the coast — eight different toll plazas greeted drivers. In much of the rest of the country, you wouldn’t find any tolls on a 100-mile stretch.

I spent a good part of my childhood summers at the Jersey Shore, and the tollbooths on the parkway always seemed to be a cruel final obstacle between me and the beach. Every 15 minutes or so, our car would have to stop yet again to drop a measly quarter in a bucket.

The ride is very different today, thanks mostly to the electronic toll system known as E-ZPass. At four of the tolls along the Garden State, the system is so sophisticated that cars barely have to slow down. A little box attached to the car’s windshield sends a message to a computer reader looming over the road, and money is then deducted from an electronic account.

I imagine that some of the children being driven to the Jersey Shore today won’t even look away from their DVD players as they glide through a toll. And I’m quite certain that very, very few of them will remember, decades from now, how much the Garden State tolls cost back when they were young. As a result of E-ZPass and its ilk, even many adults don’t notice the cost of a toll.

Which raises an interesting question: If you don’t know how much you’re paying for something, will you notice when the price goes up? Or has E-ZPass, for all its benefits, also made it easier for toll collectors to take your money?

A young economist named Amy Finkelstein started thinking about these issues a few years ago when she and her fiancé were driving back and forth between Boston, where they were living, and New York, where they were going to be married. So she collected decades of toll records from around the country and found a clear pattern.

After an electronic system is put in place, tolls start rising sharply. Take two tollbooths that charge the same fee and are in a similar setting — both on highways leading into a big city, for instance. A decade after one of them gets electronic tolls, it will be about 30 percent more expensive on average than a similar tollbooth without it. There are no shortage of examples: the Golden Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge, among them.

”You may be less aware you’re paying the toll,” said Ms. Finkelstein, now an associate professor at M.I.T., ”but you’re paying a higher toll than you used to.”

The implications of this go well beyond highways. We increasingly live in an E-ZPass economy, in which bills are paid online, corporate cafeterias are going cashless and people take along their debit card, instead of cash, when they leave the house. Last year, 55 percent of consumer spending was done electronically, mainly with credit and debit cards, while checks accounted for less than 25 percent and cash only 20 percent, according to Visa. As recently as 2003, only 45 percent of spending was done electronically.

The E-ZPass economy is indisputably more convenient. It saves time and frustration. But the old frustrations that came with cash also brought a hidden benefit: they forced you to notice that you were spending money. With electronic money, it’s much easier to be carefree.

Marketers understand this dynamic well, which is a big reason they promote refillable gift cards and other forms of money that don’t feel like money. Part of what’s so intriguing about Ms. Finkelstein’s work is that it suggests that government officials may be coming to understand the dynamic, too.

The idea that hidden taxes — and tolls are really a kind of tax — could lead to higher taxes goes back decades. Milton Friedman famously came to regret his role in creating the withholding system for income taxes during World War II, because it eventually made people forget how much they were paying in tax. ”It never occurred to me at the time,” he wrote in his autobiography, ”that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom.”

Even economists who don’t share Mr. Friedman’s political views agree with the larger point that how taxes are collected, and not just the underlying tax rate, matters. ”We need to take seriously the possibility that people are not paying attention to the tax code,” said Raj Chetty of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been conducting some fascinating experiments on semi-hidden taxes.

Mr. Chetty argues that the complexity of today’s tax code ends up aggravating inequality. Both rich and poor families face a dizzying spectrum of tax laws, from carried-interest rules to the earned-income tax credit. But affluent families are better able to navigate the system, often by hiring an accountant. Also, the little day-to-day taxes, like highway tolls, mean a lot more to a moderate-income family.

Ms. Finkelstein obviously can’t prove that electronic tolls cause prices to rise by making drivers less aware of them. Neil Gray, the head of government affairs at the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, disputes her argument and says setting tolls is more complicated than Ms. Finkelstein suggests.

But she makes a spirited case for her conclusion. She has considered a number of alternate explanations for the increases and says the evidence doesn’t support them. At the very least, electronic systems do seem to make it easier for toll collectors to increase prices.

There is one notable exception to the trend, though: the good old Garden State. Tolls on the parkway itself have increased only once in the last 50 years, back in 1989, when they were raised to 35 cents. (In the last few years, the price at each tollbooth has doubled, but highway officials have also removed half of the tolls, keeping the effective price unchanged.) Even after E-ZPass, the Garden State Parkway remains a relative bargain.

Of course, Ms. Finkelstein discovered that tolls don’t usually rise as soon as an electronic system arrives. The increases tend to come a number of years later, once electronic payment becomes old hat.

On the Garden State, the first E-ZPass system was installed in 1999. And guess what New Jersey’s governor, Jon S. Corzine, has recently been talking about? Raising the tolls on the parkway for the first time in almost 20 years.