Our nanny-state government is at it again. Rather than let the free market work its magic, it insists on coddling the looters by using tax dollars to impose a one-size-fits-all solution to the “problem” of “bridge safety” where U.S. 52 crosses the Wabash. The structural soundness of the bridge is in question according to “scientists” and “engineers.” Build a man a bridge and he’ll cross the river for half a century. Teach a man to swim, and he’ll enjoy the unregulated run-off of the Wabash. The Constitution doesn’t mention bridges even once!
Sorry about that – I’ve been reading too many right wing liberty & patriot sites. (But not so many that I feel compelled to break out the all-caps & exclamation points just yet.)
Amanda Harmon has an article in the Lafayette Journal & Courier about the deteriorating condition of the east-bound bridge of U.S. 52 over the Wabash between Lafayette and West Lafayette. It’s old, wearing down, and apparently the same design as the one that fell in Minnesota a few years back. INDOT is studying its options.
In fairness to the right-wingers and liberty types; in my experience, when you present them with specific projects, as often as not, they’ll tell you that they aren’t talking about *that* project as problem with government spending. It’s usually unspecified waste, but in any case, not the stuff they enjoy from day-to-day. It’s money spent on Them.
Maintenance is one of those things that’s politically easier to kick down the road, particularly in the face of reflexive opposition to taxes of any kind. But, the consequences are often disastrous for somebody. Hopefully, to Them instead of to Us.
This post is childish. Once again, your knowledge of the right is based on caricature, nothing more.
The right isn’t a monolith. But, as the Republican moderates get thrown to the wolves, it’s getting closer.
‘The Right’ is where you find it and now that I’m in Illinois with those who ‘brung me up’..no disprespect intended.. The big issues are Obamacare,confiscation of guns,taxes, deficit and government control.
There are no actual problems to define,except Pelosi and her national cohorts and corrupt Chicago politicians are ruining Illinois and the nation,so they have to go. Just vote Conservative,and make sure you don’t vote for anyone who lives anywhere near Chicago.
These are my examples of caricatures..all given to me last few days as presented above.
( Ill be driving Indiana again in a couple days: the Veedersburg-Richmond route..no tolls this way).
Doug, no offense, but how would you know? Listening to NPR doesn’t count.
BTW, more substantively, conservatives are not anarchists, so your OP is just stupid. Nobody says that bridges don’t fall under the purview of the government at some level. You could say that the 10th Ammendment prohibits the Feds from spending on bridges on state and local roads, but the IC clause would cover the interstates.
I read. A lot. Why just last night, I was exploring some threads at a Ron Paul site discussing how you could avoid taxes through the “UCC-1/Redemption/Strawman” method. See: e.g.
So, lou. All your information on candidates comes from attack ads on TV?
Here’s a clue: Illinois is the state of Rod Blagojavich. He is not an atypical Democrat there. They’ve run the state into the ground. Their state budget is starting the year $13B in the hole. Democrats have held the statehouse and governor’s mansion for many years, this is all on them.
Can’t help but notice that the really basket case states (California, NY, Illinois, Michigan) are all Democrat. What does that tell you?
Now that’s not a caricature.
Doug, that’s really nice that you read, but what you’re reading is ridiculous. That doesn’t represent ever 1% of “the right”.
I try not to think of Ron Paul (and a few select others) as “THE RIGHT!!!!” because he is very unlike most of his party. I like Ron Paul, and I kind of see him as the one of the very few guys/gals desperately trying to regain the controls and steer the crazy train, that the Republican party has become, to safety.
There is so much I could say, but, as this is not my blog, so I’ll save it and simply ask: If the view represented here is based solely on “caricature,” then tell me why are there so many real-life examples of this sort of rhetoric (only not in farce)? Why are so many life-long Republicans, disgusted by what they see, jumping ship?
Well, I’m happy that you think so. But, you should know, 20% of all statistics are wrong.
And here I thought UCC Article 9 was just in place to take up an entire semester in law school. Never thought of it as a debt elimination scam.
But I always thought of Ron Paul as a clown that would like to replace the monetary system with Spanish doubloons and peices of eight.
Illinois Republicans have also had a checkered past in the Governor’s office and “many years” equals over ten years, or under ten years in your estimation?
I find it difficult to believe that the Illinois legislature has been under a Democrat majority for any length of time. The state system (like Indiana’s) is designed to avoid it.
I believe that Illinois’ legislature has been D for a long time. Michael Madigan seems to have been Speaker forever. However, George Ryan was a Republican, and Illinois has had a history of Republican governors for the last 25 years or so (Thompson, Edgar and Ryan).
And 62.376% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Once again… Jesus, guys. YOU”RE ON THE INTERNET! Look it up!
Blago and Quinn have held the gov. for the last 2 terms. Democrats have held both houses for the last 10 years.
Before Blago, Republicans held the gov. But that was a loooong time ago.
I actually went to a Mitch Daniels fundraiser in downtown Chicago (at Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s law offices on Wacker Drive) and met the previous two Illinois governors who were not in jail at the time. I think that’s why I don’t like Mitch, it reeked of crony capitalism or something.
Buzzcut,
“So, lou. All your information on candidates comes from attack ads on TV?”
What I posted above goes as ‘general knowledge and common sense’ as far as I can see.But the attack ads do seem tuned in to these views and come after the fact and serve as emphasis or reminders of who ‘the bad guys’ are. Some of my relatives are now pointing out that they no longer get stuff from Fox News. I suggested once ‘we’ should watch other news sources. But I suspect Professor Beck is a mentor.
These are very good,hard-working people Im talking about. But it’s difficult to communicate and this must be the case all over the country.
It was good to have Cubs choose a new manager yesterday so now we have the Sandberg-Quade debates.I’ve always been so grateful for sports intervention.
Amazing. Last time the Republicans screwed up in Illinois, they must have really screwed up.
Back to the bridge in Minneapolis that was not maintained and therefore fell, killing motorists. MN had then and still has a conservative Republican governor. So things fall apart figuratively and literally, perhaps for different reasons, on both watches, when attention wanders from governing well to whereever the ideology du jour leads.
Disintegrating bridges are bipartisan. Here in Lake County, we have the Cline Avenue Bridge, which was recently closed (average daily volume of 30,000 cars per day, one of the heaviest traffic levels in the state). The bridge was misdesigned, badly built (it fell down once when being constructed and killed 14 workers) and unmaintained for the last 25 years. INDOT shut it down because of an accelerating rate of cracking. It will be demo’d and NOT replaced.
We’ve got another bridge, just put in in ’06, going over the Bohrman Expressway (one of the highest traffic roads in the country). Again, it looks like it was misdesigned and possibly built with inferior concrete.
The idea that Democrats spend an adequate amount of money on stuff like bridges is ludicrous. Bridges don’t vote.
Badly designed bridges in Indiana are Governor Daniels’ INDOT management in action. Of course, it’s likely it wasn’t just the present governor who followed such a policy.
One gets what one pays for, and INDOT bridge designers aren’t paid very well. It’s one of the state jobs that are always looking for (fresh meat) new employees in engineering.
I lived in Minnesota from 1999-2003. I can’t specifically comment on the reasons for the lack of the maintenance for the I-35 bridge, but I remember the collapse.
It is true that Minnesota has a Republican Governor, Pawlenty. He suceeded Ventura. Minnesota is predominately democrat, the Democratic Farm-Labor Party. DFL. But there is a substantial concentration of very conservative republicans in a southern suburb or two, and in Onoka county. That is where Michelle Bachman draws her support. In 2008 I donated money to El Tinklenberg to unseat Bachmann. He came close.
Minnesota is a very high quality of life state. The schools are well funded and the university system is top rate. There is a high concentration of educated workers and a high wage base in much of the Twin cities, especially in Minneapolis and the western suburbs. The infrastructure is well maintained and the state government competent and professional.
I lived in a small town of about 1500 people west of the twin cities. Despite its small size, it had a professionally managed city government and honest civil servants. It had a comprehensive 20-year development plan. And it did not have a police force, instead paying the county sheriff’s department for extra patrols. This saved the city a lot of money in fixed costs.
I have high regard for Minnesota.
Buzz-
Are you saying I said Democrats “spend an adequate amount of money on stuff like bridges”? I recall saying things fall apart on both watches. To get from that to what you said…well, you missed a bridge somewhere along the way, or took a wrong turn onto the bridge to nowhere.
Sorry, Mary, I did misread you.
Mitch Daniels is not responsible for the design of a bridge completed in 1986. I’d say that he’s not even responsible for a bridge completed in 2006. That bridge was probably designed under the previous administration.
From my research on the design of the Cline Avenue Bridge, I found that INDOT does not design bridges. They subcontract that out. The Cline Avenue Bridge was a “post-tensioned concrete” design that was innovative at the time, but that is giving DOT’s around the country a really hard time. They don’t last anywhere they’ve been tried.
If they subcontract bridge design, where is the oversight?
Maybe it oughta be pointed out that if the Pledge To America–that’s the one proposed by Republicans who are presumably not witless radicals, though the Overton window has moved so far the glass is wavy–is enacted, well, as pledged, it will balance the budget (and preserve the Bush tax cuts) by eliminating all Federal spending not protected by the pledges of the Pledge To America. Of course it doesn’t mention that, but that’s the only way the numbers work out. Which means no Parks system, no Medicaid, no CHIP, no school lunches, and, yes, not a penny for the Federal highway system. Of course the good news is there’s no Pledge to keep Congress operating, so it’s somewhat self-correcting.
Yes, we’ve ignored infrastructure, Republican and Democrat, for the past thirty-five years–under the pressure of the anti-tax movement, let’s remember–and it’s no surprise that whenever examples, or parody examples, are brought up someone objects that of course things won’t go that far. Which leaves us with the conclusion, borne out by those last thirty-five years, that these people are lying. California, here we come.
That’s what I am very afraid of.
Hardly the fault of the “anti-tax movement”. As long as we’ve been spending money we don’t have, our taxes have not been linked to our spending. It isn’t like we said “Well, we’d like to fix that bridge, but then we’d have to raise taxes”. Taxes have had no link to spending in years.
I’m not sure what that means exactly, Jason, but I do think it’s interesting how often people say “national debt” when they really mean “spending on things I don’t personally approve of”.
Actually, public debt is older than the United States; it traces to the American Revolution and the issuance of bills of credit; the states’ refusal to help the national government repay the debt is, rather famously, one of the primary reasons the Articles of Confederation was replaced by the US Constitution. Hamilton’s brilliant maneuvers restored our foreign credit (at your expense, if you held Continentals or lived in a state that had already paid off its debt), to the extent that we were able to borrow the $11 million needed for the Louisiana Purchase. There was a singular instant–also famously known–during the Jackson administration when the US was entirely debt free. The one time, by your calculations, when taxes were linked to spending. It began to rise again soon after.
The Debt rose appreciably during the Civil War, then vacillated until rising to meet WWI; rose again during the Great Depression, and skyrocketed at the beginning of WWII. This was the Debt Ronald Reagan would beginning running for President on twenty-five years later, and keep at it for sixteen years, before quadrupling it for no military necessity whatsoever.
The anti-tax movement to which I refer is the one which began with the Prop 13 fight in California in the 1970s and has been adopted as a slogan by the Republican party ever since, without appreciably affecting the Debt, except negatively. Federal spending on infrastructure peaked in 1980. The year is not coincidental. It also marks the end of the only administration in modern history to propose a Federal transportation budget which spent more on infrastructure and alternative energy than on incontinent road building designed to move our congestion somewhere else.