It’s time to brush your teeth, Ray LaHood.

The fluoride command is what I give my 3-year-old son before I crawl into his mushy bed and read to him about the predicaments of a curious little monkey or the messes of an aspiring chef disguised as a duck. One story and then it’s lights out, that is the rule.

So, come on Mr. Transportation Secretary, change into your pajamas (I am seeing plaid), because I am about to page through the story on how road, bridge and transit work gets funded in the U.S. Stay awake and I will get you a cold glass of water when I’m finished. Perhaps a splash in the face will bring you to your senses.

LaHood has been serving environmentalists tall glasses of warm milk recently. He’s been tucking them in and kissing each on the forehead with the sweet dreams of the Obama administration’s livability initiative. At a speaking engagement at the National Press Club recently, LaHood did what has turned into his weekly public service announcement that involves pulling Americans out of cars and pushing them into light-rail transit cars and onto bicycles. When asked if he was trying to make driving more torturous, he said, “Yeah. I mean, people don’t like spending an hour and a half getting to work. And people don’t like spending an hour going to the grocery store.”

Here is where my story for our transportation secretary begins. Everyone pull their favorite teddy bear in real close, because this short piece comes with a very strong moral. One day, not too long ago, lawmakers on Capitol Hill engineered the federal fuel tax to help pay for not only road and bridge work, but transit as well. When people are in their cars and making weekly trips to the pump, pavement is getting smoothed, light-rail systems are getting greased and spans are aging stronger, and every once in awhile a new corridor is born.

When this happens, all those in Washington jump for joy. But not too long ago, the economy turned into a big, bad wolf. People were driving less, sending the asphalt, concrete and some tracks in this great nation into a crumbled state because gas-tax receipts slimmed.

So why would LaHood, or the administration for that matter, misbehave and be in favor of a green policy that would sink the Highway Trust Fund deeper in the red?

Someone should rip a page or two of the livability initiative. And if my childish example of showing this measure’s ugly teeth is not enough, perhaps you should snuggle up to the latest research conducted by the University of California-Davis. There, academia discovered that a train car or bus that is not packed full emits more greenhouse gases into the environment than a single automobile. That sounds as livable as a cardboard box under a viaduct.

LaHood and the rest of the Obama administration has not offered any solutions; they have only discarded ideas by others like a crinkled mouth-rinsing Dixie cup. They slit the throat of a mileage-based tax as a funding mechanism for the next reauthorization bill, and they treated anyone that hinted at an increase in the federal fuel tax like a convicted murderer. All those ideas were sent up the creek back in February.

What I have not heard from the ivory tower is any answer to the fiscal crisis in the road and bridge industry. The stimulus is looking more and more like someone suffered from a brain cramp instead of providing an answer. A second Highway Trust Fund fix is in the works, but we all know that a long-term tightening is what is needed. I do not want to read what will happen without one. It could be lights out.