Bridge to Nowhere
Wow. This video features two towns I’ve visited recently, a bridge I’ve bicycled over four times, a previous employer, a personal friend, out-of-control earmarking and raving hypocrisy. Yee Haw!
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Well – not that I have any interest in defending Biden (D-MBNA) for anything.. but:
voting for an budget bill does not really equal support for any particular item in it, earmarks are often useful things (like funding the replacement of an aging bridge. Poor example, CNN) and are only roughly $18bn a year total for all the earmarks there are.
Comment by Walter R. Moore — September 30, 2008 @ 7:30 am
First, let me say that I despise earmarking in general, except in very narrow cases, so much of my response is based around that.
First, I do think it’s fair game to call out Biden on the Bridge to Nowhere. Whether or not he cared about that particular line item or not, he did vote for it. And he should be held accountable for his votes.
Second, in my opinion, Earmarking is generally a vile practice. It circumvents all of the existing infrastructure for managing and coordinating tasking, it is a direct transfer of money from the states with ‘less powerful’ congressional delegations to the states with ‘more powerful’ ones. It is also rife with corruption – there are several instances where legislators receive significant campaign contributions from a company, and then award said company with earmarks. There’s no oversight. There’s no accountability. There’s no structure here at all – just a way for legislators to throw money at projects and people with the correct levels of ‘access’. Yes, 18 billion is not a lot of money, government-wise (which is itself a problem). But I don’t want my government to include a “favor trough”. It is corrupting, and antithetical to the concepts of democracy.
Not every earmark is bad. Money for hospitals, fire stations and other civic infrastructure is not the worst thing in the world. But, on the other hand, if it was so important, the individual states should take care of these issues. Why can’t Bethany, Rehoboth and Delaware hammer out how to pay for that bridge? Why do you have to pay for it, when you’re living in Florida and may never see that bridge in your lifetime?
Lastly, I don’t know the date that the bridge was built, but to me it looked practically brand new. There were still silt fences and other signs of very recent construction. But in any case, again, who cares? If maintaining that bridge is important, it should be handled by the state of Delaware.
There’s a big outlet mall in Rehoboth, and it’s not terribly far away from Ocean City, MD, which is a fairly big tourist attraction in the mid Atlantic. I suspect that the developer/landlord of the outlet mall is a golfing buddy or meaningful donator to Joe Biden’s campaign, and he probably phoned up Joe and said ‘Joe, help me out, I need $13 million to fix the bridge’
Is this how you want government to be run? Rich men with access to power getting favors done for them by Congress? That does not seem to be the basis for a just society.
Comment by jb — September 30, 2008 @ 4:21 pm