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Jewish World Review
June 5, 2013/ 27 Sivan, 5773
Obama crosses bridge before coming to it
By
Jay Ambrose
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
An 18-wheeler truck with contents reaching too high recently slammed into an overhead crossbeam on a bridge crossing the Skagit River in Washington state. The structure and two cars went splashing down, killing no one but leading to screams that we should immediately spend billions more on bridge safety.
I guess everyone forgot that President Barack Obama took care of the problem with his stimulus package passed in 2009. Or maybe it was just rhetoric.
He had made it sound like an infrastructure paradise was on the way, and you could imagine him lost in a dream in which panting historians would at some distant point look up old videos and marvel over the enunciated vision. He had, after all, promised a national investment as large as any since President Dwight Eisenhower's historic building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, an era when something of that kind was crucial.
Sorry, but no cigar. It would have taken something more than half of the $831 billion stimulus to equal the final, inflation-adjusted cost of the Ike undertaking, not the Associated Press's recent estimate of what was actually spent: $27 billion for highway projects, of which $3 billion was for bridges. And although it has apparently been forgotten by liberals blaming any and all infrastructure shortcomings on deficit-fearing Republicans, Obama did not have to deal with the GOP. Democrats controlled both the Senate and House in those days, meaning this was a family affair, so to speak.
After the program got rolling, AP did an analysis of the 2,476 bridges that were beneficiaries of stimulus funds and found that nearly half of them were plenty safe, even though tens of thousands of potentially risky ones were not getting a dime. The thing was, the states overseeing the projects wanted to spend the money immediately to get the economy rolling along and it could take longer to start work on some of the less-sound bridges, they said.
An administration official smiled and said fine, and you might figure that made lots of sense -- except that there was a bunch of other stuff in the stimulus that would not get immediate attention, either, some of it downright silly, some of it outlandish pork. Don't forget Obama's cherished plans for high-speed rail ventures were far less shovel-ready than these bridges of which we speak.
In his State of the Union speech this year, Obama was at it again, this time asking for $50 billion to fix something like 67,000 structurally deficient bridges, perhaps making up for what previously did not get done. But there are all kinds of problems with that, too.
One is that the issue goes beyond structurally deficient bridges; that was not the problem in the Skagit River collapse. Another is that we had a sequester cutting instead of increasing the budget. The method of those cuts was indefensible, but we really, truly do have to watch the spending, especially after that stimulus and the add-on stimulus measures that followed, taking the final price between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion, by a Washington Post writer's estimate.
Still another issue is that the federal gas tax is not producing enough funds because of the economic slowdown and because of more cars that consume less gas per mile. Yet another is that the government is forever diverting infrastructure money to mass transit and other projects that don't deal with the real problems.
Check in with some of the libertarian and conservative analysts out there, and you'll learn that some of our bridge troubles have been getting better over the past decades. You will find discussion of tolls, of private-public partnerships, of more reliance on local government, and you will be reminded that prudent, responsible, disciplined government has a huge advantage over the kind that sees few limits.
It works.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
05/29/13: Biting the Apple: Nothing infuriates neo-socialist curmudgeons more than free enterprise of the vigorous, corporate kind expanding the reach of our lives
05/22/13: Evidence tells us the administrative state can be grotesquely unfair, unconstitutional, self-contradictory, unspeakably autocratically intrusive, stupid and morally repulsive
05/15/13: It's raining cats, dogs and scandals
05/08/13: Grads, heed Jefferson, not Obama
05/01/13: Letting planes fly on time
04/24/13: How about having a poetry century?
03/28/13: TV news can give you the blues
03/20/13: We're upside down and debt crash is coming
03/13/13: Stock market is downright perky. Blame the corporations
03/06/13: Bloomberg rivals Carrie Nation
02/27/13: The Wily One is proving in polls that it's no toughie to fool lots of people most of the time
02/20/13: On Obama, swans, goulash and invisibility
02/13/13: Drones and hypocrisy
01/30/13: The Nixonian Obama
01/23/13: Is Obama making JFK-style mistakes?
01/02/13: Kerry nomination emblematic of woes coming
12/26/12: Hollywood beats Harvard in history?
12/12/12: Immigration issues solve themselves
12/06/12: Durbin's deficiency
11/29/12: Man of the century
11/21/12: A big scandal coming?
11/14/12: U.S. should follow the Swedish path
11/07/12: Hanging from a poll
• 10/31/12: A dream that wouldn't come true
• 10/29/12: When the 'kooks' and 'racists' turn out to be your ideological allies
• 10/24/12: The pettiness refuge
• 10/18/12: An interruption that tells a bigger tale
• 10/17/12: A recovery that wasn't
• 10/12/12: Big Bird squabble points to something real
• 10/11/12: The 'war' you don't hear about --- the one on average Americans
• 08/22/12: Obama leadership: Romney's returns trump road to recovery
• 08/15/12: Saving Medicare the Ryan way
• 08/01/12: Combatting free speech
• 07/25/12: Good and bad reactions to Colorado horror
• 07/18/12: Apology time for Obama
• 07/16/12: Free markets solve climate change threats
• 07/11/12: Humans and particles and those who would order them
• 07/06/12: Why we'll miss Andy Griffith
• 07/05/12: All will feel Affordable Care Act's bite
• 07/02/12: A social solution --- homes with dads
• 06/27/12: Being a 'nation of immigrants' is not an excuse
• 06/20/12: Barack Obama the autocrat
• 06/18/12: Bradbury's lessons for today
• 06/13/12: Should this leaking administration sink?
• 06/11/12: Simpson bashes back on reform
• 06/05/12: Legalize sugary drinks, ban dangerous drugs
• 06/04/12: Keep America from going Greek
• 06/01/12: Don't believe in Obama's fairy tales
• 05/30/12: Writing a book? Beats prison
• 05/23/12: Student loans fail students
• 05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
• 05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
• 05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
• 05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
• 05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
• 04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
• 04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
• 04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
• 04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
• 04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest —- or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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