North Star Writers Group

On Wednesday, my lifelong home of the Twin Cities suffered an unthinkable horror that none of us ever would have even thought possible. The Interstate 35W freeway bridge simply fell into the Mississippi River that it spans, as if someone had reached down with a giant invisible scissors and snipped it in two. And those unlucky enough to be on it at that moment experienced the inevitable effects of the only thing even more certain than death and taxes – gravity.

The blame game is sure to rev up once the victims' bodies have been recovered and the investigation and cleanup can commence. In some liberal quarters, it already has begun, saying the bridge collapse was caused by a failure to raise gas taxes, amongst other shibboleths. This position is as disgusting as it is phony, and it's phony in so many ways.

Minnesota already has the sixth-highest per-capita tax burden in America, and came into this year's legislative session with a surplus of better than $2 billion. If not for Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto of a Democratic-sponsored tax increase bill, we'd be Number One. (Sadly, rather than fighting for tax cuts, the governor pre-emptively surrendered, joining with Democrats to spend the entire surplus, though not on roads or bridges.)

Furthermore, Minnesota has a $34 billion biennial budget, up from just $7 billion in the late 1980s, in inflation-adjusted constant dollars. So the problem is clearly not one of undertaxation or lack of revenue. In fact, Minnesota's government has never been bigger or more expensive. Thus, to insinuate that the problem was a lack of funds is just a lie.

The problem is simply that shockingly few of all those tax dollars in that otherwise bloated budget are spent on roads and bridges, either to maintain older ones or to expand and build new ones to handle the additional vehicles that inevitably come with a growing metropolis. Traffic in the Twin Cities is on the verge of total gridlock. A recent study by the Reason Foundation ranked us second only to Los Angeles in urban-freeway congestion. A massive infusion of money for new construction has been desperately needed for years.

But the liberal-controlled Legislature has simply refused to provide it, so consumed are they by their radical environmentalist hatred of all motorized vehicles. What transportation dollars there are – paid almost entirely by drivers via the gas tax – regularly get siphoned off to other things, including but certainly not limited to the liberals' favorite boondoggle, light-rail. (This is what they really mean when blaming the gas tax – they didn't get the money they wanted to manipulate people into giving up their cars and trucks.) And what they can't stop, the Sierra Club and its lawyers swat down with perpetual environmental lawsuits. A badly needed replacement for the 70-year old Stillwater Lift Bridge over the St. Croix River is now 20 years overdue because the Sierra Club has single-handedly stopped it.

So even if the gas tax had been higher, none of that money would ever have been spent on roads or bridges. Therefore, to blame the 35W bridge collapse on that is disingenuous beyond belief.

What will it take to get anybody to question the spending side of the equation?

Are we really supposed to believe that the entire $34 billion budget is so important that fixing a crumbling bridge couldn't come before anything else? Is it all that sacred and sacrosanct, even though 80 percent of it didn't exist a mere 20 years ago? Especially when so much of the budget consists of things that are not and cannot be government's business for a free people under a Constitution that is supposed to be the supreme law of the land? Perhaps if government stayed within its proper, few, well-defined and limited roles, there would be money for upgrading bridges before they fell into rivers!

This isn't just typical political fighting to be tuned out as it descends into childish partisanship. There are real-world consequences to making wrong choices. Things aren't automatically going to turn out fine in the end no matter what. Innocent people were killed in horrific fashion, dying entirely avoidable deaths, because foolish ideas were entertained for much too long. How many more have to suffer thus before we get serious, choose what's right and do what must be done?

The deliberate neglect of roads and bridges is not a problem specific to Minnesota. It's the result of environmental extremism taking root in government all through America. And unless we fight the good fight and get the concrete, asphalt and steel flowing, I fear yesterday's unfortunate victims won't be the last.

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