Socialist Roads Are Expensive

The Chicago Tribune reports:

In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, House Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) was struck with a blinding insight on how to solve the problem of neglected infrastructure. Before you continue reading, let me suggest that you take a pair of vise grips and use them to get a tight hold on your wallet. Because what occurred to Oberstar is that the federal government needs more money to spend on aging bridges.

"If you're not prepared to invest another 5 cents in bridge reconstruction and road reconstruction, then God help you," he declared. Actually, he doesn't want just a single nickel, but a nickel on every gallon of gas sold to motorists, which would amount to a 27 percent increase in the federal fuel tax. This boost, he insists, would last only three years, bringing in $25 billion in new revenue.

But just two years ago, Congress and President Bush agreed on a federal highway bill with a six-year price tag of $286 billion. Nationally, all bodies of government spend in the neighborhood of $150 billion a year on roads. Somewhere in that mountain of cash, you might think, there must be funds that could be spared to keep bridges from rotting and falling down.

You would be right. When the 2005 package passed, it included 6,736 special projects inserted by members for the benefit of their home districts, which had a total price tag of $24 billion—helping to make it what the organization Taxpayers for Common Sense called "by far the most expensive, wasteful highway bill in the nation's history."

In the private sector,failure means elimination.In the public sector failure means the statists want to confiscate more money.For the way out of the socialist problem,consider this book.