McCain blames Minnesota bridge collapse on wasted money
Next up from McCain: 9/11 was caused by unnecessary pork-barrel projects.
What a total ass McCain has become.
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that politicians have any more than a passing acquaintance with logic or facts.
If it makes a good sound bite, and convinces someone to vote for him, that’s the name of the game.
McCain has fathered a black child.
I know this because Republicans told me so.
This seems pretty weak to me. Granted, most problems can be solved with more money, so blaming pork for any given problem is a bit of a stretch. But when it comes to infrastructure repair (and inspection) in particular, it is a pretty close nexus.
The better complaint is that John McCain would likely label money earmarked to fix this bridge as “pork.” There is no good definition of what is pork and what is much-needed federal money for a local project.
For me the distinction lies at if the distribution to a local project occurs at a legislative level or an executive beaureacratic level. Hopefully the agency tasked with distributing funds will do so in a less blatantly political manner in line with the best possible value for the agency’s money. Legislators just want more funding regardless of the relative benefit.
McCain was arguing against ‘earmarks’ (as quoted in the linked article). ‘Earmarks’ didn’t cause this design flaw.
Exactly.
A good sign that an earmark is ‘pork’ is the fact that the money has to be earmarked in the first place, rather than being appropriated through the various federal agencies and budgets.
Another good sign is when the earmark is tacked into an unrelated, yet politically popular bill. If you see an earmark of 100 million dollars for the perverted arts attached to a bill to save Springfield from destruction, you can bet that those 100 million dollars didn’t have a hope in hell of being spent if it had to be voted for on its merits.
Look, you’ve got a system where a 200 million dollar bridge to a small island can be appropriated while the levees in New Orleans crumble.
This particular bridge that McCain was talking about had a design error, but he’s right on the general point - the U.S. has thousands of bridges that are beyond their design lifetimes and are deteriorating and even unsafe. You’d think this would be a priority, wouldn’t you? But reinforcing an existing bridge just isn’t sexy. It doesn’t win you votes like a nice hockey rink or park does, and it doesn’t preserve you for posterity like building some memorial structure does. You want to be remembered as “John Politician, a man who’s tireless work brought our city the John Politician center for the study of Excellence.”, not “John Politician, the guy who’s name is on a plate somewhere on a bridge, because he worked tirelessly to replace the 3/16” gussetting."
Earmarks put too much power in the hands of some very average people. When you have the power to direct the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars to various moneyed interests, you’re going to get a lot of temptation thrown your way.
Yet another reason why government should be kept as small as possible.
His argument is that inspection and repair, which are often government-funded, may have indeed been funded if we weren’t busy spending our money on pork. I see nothing wrong with that, except that it is pretty generic.
Yeah, but did the bridge ever say: “Not God bless America. God damn America!”?
And I don’t either. As a matter of fact, I read the latest ASCE Report Cardwith a sinking feeling. According to their estimate, infrastructure is underfunded to the tune of 1.6 trillion in the U.S.
My problem is blaming the collapse of the I-35 bridge on ‘earmarks’. That’s just an untruth IMO.
Not unless the owner of the bridge design firm was some legislator’s brother in law. Which I wouldn’t rule out.
Agreed.
While Sam Stone addressed this point later on, it bears repeating. A lot of good, worthwhile programs can be made to sound ridiculous, too. And a lot of money wasting pits can be made to sound sensible.
At the moment, the problem I have with “pork” is that for the most part congressional delegations have a de facto obligation to bring back to their districts as much pork as possible. If legislator, congressperson, or senator X doesn’t “support local projects,” whatever their merits, they won’t get re-elected. And so you end up with things like the Toronto-Rochester Fast Ferry debacle. Which may have been a viable idea, but which was implemented in the most short-sighted, and insane manner possible. It wasn’t until after the former mayor was out of office that the NYS GAO actually got a look at the process and while nothing was quite actionable, let’s just summarize things by saying the scrutiny the original contractor, and the business model got were about as skeptical as the Iraq intelligence prior to the current war.
Do you think that’s what McCain meant? I don’t know Minnesota politics, but the design & construction firms are a matter of record:
Was an owner of Sverdrup & Parcel a relative of anyone in the Legislature at the time?
This is a joke, right? This is a setup? You cannot be serious. How’s the War on Drugs going? The War on Poverty? How about education, we’ve been throwing billions down that pit for a while, is it getting any better? How about AIDS in Africa? Has that been solved by the billions we’ve thrown at it? I assume now that we’ve spent about a trillion dollars in Iraq, all those problems are solved, right?
I HATE this assumption that just throwing money at a problem will help. Can you give me an example of a problem that was solved by spending a lot of money on it? I can’t think of any, yet that is always the default solution of government, spend some more money on it. And the problems only get worse.
But you are referring to social problems, which may or may not be helped by infusions of money.
McCain was talking about physical problems, such as inadequate bridges. Surely you’d agree that a broken bridge would benefit from more money being spent to keep bridges fixed?
Well, one example would be the thing I was referring to in the context of my quote: inspecting and repairing bridges.
And though I see no reason to take my quote as some absolute statement of the way of the world, I think it is entirely defensible if you choose to take it so literally. I mean, we could solve poverty by giving every person one billion dollars. Done. No more poverty (at least for a while). We could solve Iraq by paying every insurgent a trillion dollars to go the mall instead of blow things up. Or, if you prefer, shoot all of Al-Anbar province into space. Education? No problem. Three private tutors, family counseling, and free college for every child (and since we’ve solved poverty, education would get a whole lot easier anyway).
No, I don’t think that’s what McCain meant, and I have no idea whether this company has some family connection to the legislature.
The 1955 Poliomyelitus Vaccination Assistance Act.
It’ll be a relief to you not to have to make that embarrassing admission anymore.
The problem is, the “wars” on drugs and poverty are nebulous affairs, and it’s difficult to see that they actually consist of a million independent programs, some of which cost a little, some a lot, some of which are very effective, some less so, and some of which are misguided to begin with. But if you look at only the facts that (1) the government spends money and (2) life is still imperfect, you’re always going to come to the same deranged conclusion: that “throwing money at problems” is at best ineffective and usually counterproductive. Not true at all. Even subsidized public education wasn’t wasted money, at least for some of us.
You can criticize government spending on any number of grounds: that the amount spent is out of proportion to the target problem, that the funded programs will be ineffective for technical reasons, that there is corruption involved in the process, that what the government sees as a problem is actually desirable, that the attempt to solve a target problem will create worse problems, and so on. But the blanket statement that government spending only makes things worse is just foolish.
Take this case. If McCain was trying, badly, to say that the bridge collapsed because we spent money on frivolous things that otherwise would have gone to reinforce this bridge, that’s one thing (I don’t quite see a firm chain of cause-and-effect here, but maybe there was a Senate Bill titled “Free Pornography for Incarcerated Prisoners Instead of Keeping People from Dying in a Bridge Collapse Appropriation Act of 2008”). Any other interpretation makes no sense at all. Because we know how to work on bridges, and throwing money at this one would probably have prevented its collapse. Of course, we’d never have known then that the bridge wouldn’t have lasted another fifty years and some would be pointing at the repairs and yelling “Pork!”
I was just curious, no offence intended. 
Engineers are supposed to be above all that, but I’m not so stupid to think that it* never* happens.
I just hope someone checks out other bridges they designed that may have the same problems, and if they do find more faulty designs they really should check into how the contracts got awarded to them.