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.”

You Betcha I'm Entitled!

Quote of the day (humbly from myself):
“[An Inconvenient Truth] puts to rest for good the idea that the climate changes scientists have been noticing for years are just part of a natural cycle that the earth has seen before.”
--From I’d like to Thank the Academy

Most unexpected Valentine’s quote of the day:
“Marriage in America is to love as laxatives are to constipation. Something that makes everything flow much easier.”
--Jolynn Hope Brooks

Thanks to Barbara (not her real name) for today’s “guest annoyance”:

“I get really sick of hearing Social Security and Medicare referred to as ‘entitlements’ that have to reined in. If by entitlement they mean a benefit that I'm ‘entitled’ to because I've been paying into it for my entire adult life, fine.

“If, however, they mean a social welfare program that I ‘feel entitled’ to because I'm just a suck on society, that makes me mad. When the government automatically deducts money from my paycheck and requires me to send them a percentage of my self-employment earnings for these programs, I think the government and I have a contract together.

“So there.”