22 Trillion Dollars And Not Enough 'Bridges' Were Created or Saved - Granite Grok

22 Trillion Dollars And Not Enough ‘Bridges’ Were Created or Saved

Broken BridgeThere is talk in Washington of raising the federal gas tax to deal with our “crumbling infrastructure.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — As gasoline prices plunge to the lowest level in more than five years, some lawmakers see a golden opportunity to bump up taxes at the pump to help pay for the repair of crumbling roads and bridges.

Fuel taxes have been flat for more than 20 years, starving the Highway Trust Fund of revenue used for rising infrastructure repair costs. Lawmakers have fueled the fund with last-minute short-term injections of cash, but want to find a more permanent fix.

The feds have spent 22 trillion on the Federal ‘Government’ since 2009.  Given the obvious mismanagement of that sum, why would we allow them to take more?

Eight trillion of the twenty-two trillion has been new debt on top of our old debt, nearly doubling the irresponsible debt Democrats inherited when Obama took office and the left ran congress unimpeded.  (Irresponsible debt must have meant irresponsibly low.)

The first thing Democrats did was to pass a massive stimulus package.  They then bought third-world dictator-sized signs, murals in honor of Dear leaders commitment to infrastructure, and erected them along-side roadways and in front of bridges all across the parts of the fruited plain you could still get to given how lousy they said the roads were.

A while later, the signs came down, but the rhetoric and the spending binge continued.  It has been nearly six years now since Stimulus 1.0 and what do we have to show for that? An untrustworthy Highway trust fund,  $22,000,000,000,000.00 we’ll never see again, a national debt up from 10 Trillion to 18 Trillion, and talk of raising the gas tax.

It should seem remarkable to even the most uninformed voter that in spite of all that spending and the ballooning budgets that Mother Highway Trust Fund Hubbard’s cupboard is still bare.  But it is a tragic tale.  She can barely manage to give the union bosses and lobbyists a decent bone when they come knocking.  And how can they be expected to continue funding Democrat campaigns if there isn’t any infrastructure money?

I know, lets raise the minimum wage seven dollars an hour so that everyone above the base wage gets a rise as well.  Then we can charge union workers more dues and refill our coffers, and while you’re at it, seeing as we think people will “have more money” why don’t we raise the gas tax to “fix” those crumbling roads and bridges?  We’ll ‘Create’ good paying construction jobs, and….(insert same old song and dance here, stagnating economy, declining workforce, and so on).

All things considered, I don’t think the solution to the highway trust fund problem is an increase in the federal gas tax.  I think it’s placing any trust whatsoever in the people in charge of the highway trust fund.

And Uncle Sam’s liver can’t process any more “stimulus” without aggravating his sclerosis of the dollar, so that’s out.

The solution is a change in management, away from Washington.

Congress tried to facilitate that change over the summer, but Senate Democrats killed the bill.   Now that we’ve removed that barrier to success we need to convince the Republican congress to sell this idea to the people and to each other.

We need an endless flood of bills, poured under Obama’s Veto pen, so that he must explain why the same government that spent 22 trillion and didn’t set some aside for those ‘crumbling roads and bridges’ like they promised, should continue to hold our trust when it comes to managing highway spending.

The idea?

Remove this responsibility for infrastructure from Washington and return it to the states.   Leave most or all of the Federal gas tax money where it came from and let the states handle the infrastructure within their respective borders. When needed, neighboring states can work together for their mutual advantage.  Regional coalitions could exist for larger arteries with more oversight by key players with taxpayers and watchdog groups looming closer to the people spending the money; ready to raise the red flag or change the guard when things fail to improve.  (This probably wont work everywhere–Massachusetts comes to mind–but anything is better than leaving this power with the ‘crats in DC.  Democrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats.)

This is clearly a job the Federal government can’t be trusted to handle and only clings to for money laundering and influence peddling.  That is fixing we could without.

Take it back.  Republicans in the House and Senate wanted to do it last year, they should be more than willing to do it this year.  The Federal government needs to get out of the business of roads and bridges and the sooner the better.

 

 

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