Friday, August 3, 2007

Infrastructure, Yes. Paying For It, No.


Quote of the day:
“One is old and a child at the same time. One wonders what happened to the years in between.”
--Ingmar Bergman, from his film Fanny and Alexander

Quote of the day no. 2:
“Bridges in America should not fall down.”
--U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters

Last night I was tuning between the newscasts on ABC and CBS. They each had exactly the same top three stories. The third was a Mattel toy recall, and the first two were the same length and were written so similarly as to be interchangeable.

The first dealt with the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The second story was about the mantra of the moment, “America’s Crumbling Infrastructure.” There should be a clause added to this mantra. Let’s use the acronym “ACIGUTI.”

“America’s Crumbling Infrastructure, Get Used To It.”

Little will change unless we’re willing to pay to change it. That means higher taxes, reordering priorities or both.

We show spectacularly little inclination to reorder priorities. Especially when it concerns the incredibly immense and breathlessly bloated defense budget, in spite of which we still can’t get sufficient armor to our troops. Have you looked at that budget recently? It has grown rapidly in recent years. If you’re very concerned about where your taxes are going, it’s worth your time to look at it, or read about it.

And how about higher taxes? Here in San Diego, raising taxes is considered the moral equivalent of strangling your grandmother. Nationally, that attitude has grown over the last several years.

What we’re left with is this: We can watch the stories of human drama in Minneapolis and feel sorry and sad. We can consternate and say “How could people let this happen?” But those people were merely doing what all of us have told them to do: maintain the infrastructure with available resources (translation: no money).

Sadness, sorrow, anger, self-righteousness. They all make us feel better today. But they change nothing.

That’s why I say today, “ACIGUTI.”

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