Wanted: Facts, Patience and Perspective

Not Wanted: Emotional Hysteria

“A bridge in America just shouldn't fall down."

So spake the junior Senator from Minnesota, Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Even by the lofty standard of the deliberative branch of the legislature she is a model of wisdom and insight. And because “bridges shouldn’t fall down,” a whole host of charlatans, demagogues, ideologues and parasites are already angling to leverage the I-35W bridge collapse as a means to increase government taxing and spending. This has all the earmarks of the new post-Katrina disaster-management model. Every one run around screaming, maximize emotional commitment to “solving” something, and under no circumstances permit facts, perspective or patience to enter the picture. Our government is apparently being run by a bunch of teenage girls. Which is why Amy Klobuchar is the perfect spokesgirl for them.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a big deal. I live in the Minneapolis area. Like everyone else in these parts I used that bridge all the time. It’s quite a psychological shock to see it go “poof” and fall into the river. But intellectual honesty demands that we attempt to put it in its correct perspective.

At this point, it appears that the final death toll will be less than 15 people. While every one of those people was a unique human being, as well as somebody’s loved one, and thus should never be minimized, it is worth noting that 43 people died in Minnesota in June in “routine” traffic accidents. And they were also unique human beings with lovely families. Many more people have been murdered in Minneapolis this year than died in the bridge collapse. Thus, while it is a fact that the bridge collapse was a significant structural failure, it was not a “human disaster” in any meaningful sense. It is a very serious traffic accident. To treat it as the biggest thing since Katrina is to allow oneself to completely lose perspective, and to wallow in shallow and ultimately empty emotional hysterics.

Similarly, to treat it as a symbol of the horrid state to which we have let our infrastructure sink is dishonest. “Look! See there! Our infrastructure is literally crumbling before us”. Well, no, it isn’t. The interstate system is aging, and that brings with it a lot of repair work. Which is happening on an ongoing basis. The Federal DOT Highway (which includes bridges) budget for 2008 is somewhere in the vicinity of $40 billion. That would repair a lot of bridges. But there are other choices to be made also. New roads need to be built, surfaces need to be repaved, additional stretches of West Virginia highway to be named after Robert Byrd. This year DOT determined that there is a total backlog of about $14 Billion in bridge work to get us caught up. By allotting an additional 2.9 Billion a year we could get caught up in just a few years.

But that would be too sensible. But sense seems to be of precious little value with the screaming teenage girl crowd. Among other inconvenient facts is the one that says no matter how much more money would have been spent on bridge repairs, this accident still would have occurred. The reason it wasn’t repaired was not that there wasn’t money to repair it, it was that inspectors had not found anything indicating that it required immediate attention. That may represent an inspection problem. But it does not represent a money problem.

A couple of months ago I wrote in this space that despite lofty pro-choice rhetoric to the contrary, liberals are actually scared to death when faced with an actual choice. They almost always seek out a solution that allows them to avoid the choice while passing the costs on to someone else. This is the perfect example of that dynamic.

There is plenty of money in the Federal and Minnesota budgets to accommodate all needed bridge repair work as quickly as we want to do it. All we need to do is reprioritize where our money is being spent. I’m sure we could re-route a few billion from farm subsidies, just to find one easy example. But they don’t want to do that. I am afraid few Republicans have the stomach for it either. It is a somewhat frightening example of the power of rent-seeking that it is less risky for politicians to immediately jump to proposing a huge gas tax increase than it is to mess with special interest privileges or pork. Kind of makes clear where the priorities are.

Just as “A bridge in America just shouldn't fall down," so to the teenage girl caucus no government cause should go unfunded. No teacher should have to buy pencils. No salamander should go unprotected. No agri-business should have to face the cold, hard market without government protection.

No facts, patience or perspective are welcome in this world.

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