Katrinafying Minnesota's Disaster
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Government: Bodies hadn't even been pulled out of the river in the Minneapolis bridge collapse before President Bush was being blamed. But sticking it to Bush is infantile. Civic priorities are what need re-examination.
As a matter of fact, the president cannot repair every pothole or monitor the soundness of every bridge in the U.S. at the federal, state and local level. Would anyone really want a federal government that was that all-powerful and controlling?
But that doesn't seem to matter when a failure occurs, as horrifically happened with the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in urban Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Already some have leveled blame at the president. Even before records are examined as to the whys and wherefores of the Minnesota disaster, Bush is being criticized for America's decaying urban infrastructure. It's all so easy.
Conventional wisdom among Bush-haters has it that "Bush's" war on terror is pulling funds from necessary national infrastructure projects and letting the country fall apart. Democratic demagogues used this to good end in the Hurricane Katrina disaster that hit New Orleans, and then echoed it with the devastating tornado that flattened 99% of Greensburg, Kan., this past May.
Now that another disaster has hit, this time in Minneapolis, the same fact-free finger-pointing is starting:
"A trillion spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren't enough cops on the street and bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and ignore the rising chances of disaster," lamented Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
"I can't help but feel the desire to go straight for the money that should have been used on my cities' federally funded interstate highway infrastructure by re-appropriating it directly from Blackwater and Halliburton," whined Bretton Jones at MinneaPolitics.com.
"We spend billions in Iraq. While we fall apart at home," wrote a contributor to the Democrats' hallowed net-roots site, Daily Kos.
"I can't help thinking that the Bush tax cuts and corruption has contributed to this. Our country is falling apart, but Bush doesn't care as long as (his) cronies get to make money," wrote another.
The bid to blame Bush, and for that matter Minnesota's tax-cutting Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, as if they were all-powerful and legislatures and officialdom didn't matter, is an old story.
A look at the facts shows something different.
The federal government is responsible for building bridges and other interstate infrastructure. Bush doesn't appropriate money for this; Congress does.
States maintain the infrastructure, managing funds from federal sources and the local tax base. If there isn't enough money spent on infrastructure, it's not a question of Bush stealing money for Halliburton, but rather of what the state legislatures' priorities are.
Federal money for infrastructure has fallen in recent years, but not because of the war on terror. Rather, as Peter Barry Chowka observed on the American Thinker Web site, it's because of the growth in entitlement spending, like Medicare and Social Security.
Spending's soaring at the local level, thanks to the Bush boom and surging tax revenues. This has prompted state and city governments to expand social programs and hire lots of bureaucrats.
But cities, towns, counties and states aren't spending on unsexy projects like bridge and highway infrastructure, which benefit everyone. No, they're focusing their efforts on entitlements, opting for easy votes over public safety. When the time comes for infrastructure spending, funds get diverted instead to day care centers, "affordable housing" and other pork — not bridges, ports and roads.
Minnesota is a better-run state than most, and by all appearances did not scrimp on maintenance or infrastructure ahead of this bridge collapse.
Nevertheless, something failed that will probably require more spending for infrastructure. The latter is not as sexy as day care centers, bilingual education or global warming boondoggles. But it's far more badly needed.
As the Federal Highway Administration notes, 200,000 bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and 80,000 bridges need repairs and upgrades just as much as Minneapolis' bridge that crashed into the Mississippi on Wednesday. It's a wake-up call.
Ohio Sen. George Voinovich is pushing what he calls the National Infrastructure Improvement Act. It would spend more on infrastructure. Like all things, the legislature will have to decide if it's worth the spending. Blaming Bush isn't going to do that.
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