Why Did the Bridge Fall Down?
3 August 2007 - 20 אב 5767 by Huw
Sadly, that’s an easy answer - even without yet knowing the actual cause. It’s called priorities. As a nation we’re notoriously bad at setting them.
Look at this from Time:
Tim Pawlenty, speaking Thursday afternoon at a press conference, there are no fewer 70,000 to 80,000 bridges in the U.S. in the same category; at least another 80,000 are considered “functionally obsolete,” or not up to current design standards, another label that fails to testify to a structure’s safety for travel.
It would be so expensive to fix hundreds of thousands of bridges, that it’s just not going to happen. But these numbers highlight the problem of the nation’s infrastructure. No word is likely to make taxpayers’ eyes glaze over more quickly. As a result, officials at all levels of government tend to defer maintenance on bridges and roadways; the voters wouldn’t stand for the required expenditures, estimated at more than $9 billion a year.
9 Billion a year… well… lookit here:
Spending nearly 500 Billion while saving the world means nothing if we kill ourselves. And Keeping Us Safe from loonies who want to blow things up… while the things they want to blow up fall down all by themselves… is not keeping us safe.
500 Billion. Do the math: that’s enough for nine years of infrastructure repairs. As federal money that should be paying for our interstates went down a hole in the middle east, so the rest of the nation will go down the tubes.
Time Mag is right, btw. When I look at how my tax money is spent I rarely care about the invisible things: highways, my friend, Chris’ federal salary, etc. What I care about are visible things - the war, Senators’ prostitute bills, the cost of the President’s friends. Bread and circuses.
Sadly, Time is right…
Worse, if you look at many of the earmarks that our Congressmen sponsor, you can see that many of them are simply vote-getters that may or may not be needed. Certainly many of them should be in a lower priority rating that fixing a bridge. But fixing a bridge is not a vote-getter.
BTW, ahem, highway money was getting cut long before Iraq and this administration or even the previous one. Sadly, the money going to Iraq would not have gone to the highways in any case. There were NO Democratic congresspeople clamoring for highway infrastructure expenditures anymore than there were Republican ones.
However, I saw my first Democratic congresswoman getting religion this morning on infrastructure and talking as though she had been at the forefront of infrastructure fixing all along. Oddly enough, she was not able to cite one bill she had co-sponsored on infrastructure expenditures. And, not quite so oddly, she was claiming that somehow it must be a Republican problem. Sounds like same old same old to me.
Didn’t want to imply that was the *only* place we were throwing money away… but it did have a nice javascript counter! And you are certainly right about the lack of clamouring before the fact.
Maybe an overall debt clock would have been just as fun…
I remember reading an article in the atlantic monthly about 6-7 years ago that talked about the disrepair of our nations infrastructure (focused I think on bridges.) and the need to address it.