This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Stipulated: The federal government spends too much money, and too much of the money it spends is borrowed.

But thoughtless failure to fund a government operation, especially one that is fully paid for with its own dedicated revenue stream, is not something that Congress should count as an accomplishment. Especially when said failure does not shrink the deficit, help the taxpayer, assist the traveling public or boost the economy.

Because members of Congress are busy trading jabs over their collective failure to keep the Treasury from becoming the largest deadbeat in human history, a great many other legislative details have been left unattended.

Among them is the reauthorization of many of the Federal Aviation Administration's functions. The ticket tax that funds improvements to the nation's air travel infrastructure, a 7.5 percent surcharge collected by the airlines, expired at midnight Friday. Monday, as airlines moved at supersonic speed to raise their fares by 7.5 percent, the end of that funding stream led to the immediate furlough of some 4,000 FAA employees and stop-work orders on some $2.5 billion worth of already authorized airport and air safety construction projects.

OK. So airplanes won't be falling out of the sky. Neither the FAA nor its parent agency, the Department of Transportation, is so stupid as to let its essential day-to-day functions slide that way. The money for air traffic and inspection functions comes out of a different (debt-boosting) pocket.

What's maddening is that the airport trust fund is self-supporting. Money paid by those who use the system goes in. Money that benefits the safety of those same people — as well as keeping a system that is crucial to the economy functioning — goes out.

Stopping that flow does nothing to balance the budget or pay off the national debt. The halt does, however, end thousands of construction and related jobs created by the airport, radar and communications upgrades that were to be funded by the trust fund. And that, in at least a small way, was doing something about an unemployment rate that has remained stubbornly high many months after the recession was declared over by economists who still have jobs.

Stopping that air safety spending did nothing to close the deficit gap because — unlike our wars, our Medicare drug plans or our tax cuts for the rich — it was already paid for.

Governing is about making choices. Choosing to let the airline ticket tax expire was a bad one. Not as bad as a national debt default, mind you, but still pretty bad.