Alaskans are peculiarly obsessed with boondoggle bridges. Don’t forget the proposed bridge across Turnagain Arm from Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula (if Jerry Ward is for it, you can bet there is corruption involved), and the ultimate Bridge to and from Nowhere, the proposal to span the Bering Strait between the Seward Peninsula and the Chukchi Peninisula in Siberia (53 miles!).
Oy! You had to go and ruin a perfectly good Sunday by bringing up Jerry (I love everyone; I love homosexuals; I just don’t love their lifestyle) Ward. I grew up with this little shit and he’s only gotten worse with age, except now he plays the Alaska Native race card every chance he gets. Hey, guess what one of the articles on the front page of the Anchorage Times was the day I graduated high school in 1965? “Knik Arm Bridge Proposed”! How anyone can think that this is actually going to happen is beyond me. The pork money brought in for the project will be pissed away doing ‘feasibility studies’ by political cronies.
What pork did Frist manage to wrangle for his own hometown and state from this same billl? A local college needed a new multi-million dollar parking area and they are getting it. I guess it doesn’t matter that this school, David Lipscomb University, is privately owned and operated by the Church of Christ.
Right. And Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, brought back huge swag for his state in this bill. It’s not very useful trying to point fingers at Democrats or Republicans as being ‘the problem’. If ever there was a bipartisan problem with government, this is it.
Maybe George W. Bush could, I don’t know, VETO the friggin’ bill, or has nobody told him that the president actually has that power?
We’re talking about federal pork here. It’s a New Yorker’s business no matter where it’s spent.
Actually, it has not quite 627,000 people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska), and its area (1.7 million square kilometers) is almost three times that of Texas (696,241 SK).
How come, with all these huge improbable bridges being built in Alaska, the state’s capital and third-largest city, Juneau, remains entirely inaccessible by road? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneau%2C_Alaska
He has the power to veto a bill in toto, but he has no line-item veto.
That’s closer to double than triple… anyway, carry on. 
A Bering Bridge would be Way Cool and Tres Awesome, IMO – but who would use it? How much shipping traffic is there between Alaska and Siberia at present? I suppose it could be used for commerce between Eastern Asia and the New World in general, but in view of the distances to cover, would it really offer a monetary advantage over shipping by sea or air?
Yes, those projects may or may not be pork, it’s debatable. But this bridge is inarguably pork and was never presented as anything else. But why do the alaskans support this bridge? What possible benifit do they derive from it? If your state senator is going to be bringing back blatant pork, why not have it be for useful projects? In short, I don’t see a single person apart from the Senator who benifits from this.
Construction companies in Alaska, Alaskan workers, supply companies, etc. That $233 million is going to someone…
You know, it’s a jobs bill. When you hear about how many jobs government ‘creates’, THIS is how they do it. The average citizen reads the paper and sees, “Thanks to Senator X, our state will see 1000 new jobs over the next five years, and $233 million dollars will be injected into the local economy!”
How many times have you seen an article like that? When it’s YOUR state, how critically do you think about whether or not you need this particular boondoggle? From the standpoint of the locals, federal money being diverted to their community is ALWAYS a good thing. That gets the good Senator re-elected, and ensures that the whole corrupt system survives for at least another election cycle.
But other people benefit as well. Primarily the landowners who own title to the properties on the island. With bridge access, their property values will likely shoot up. Probably big donaters to the campaigns of Alaska’s senators.
And here’s the other flaw. Let’s suppose that having a bridge is better than not having one. This may in fact be true. But the real question to be asked is whether or not $233 million in taxpayer money could be better spent elsewhere. And that’s a question that government is simply incapable of answering. Every single special interest will lobby the government to convince them that their pet project is the most important thing the nation can build. They may even believe that. But how do you adjudicate between many such requests? Is a new bridge in Alaska ‘more important’ than, say, a new highway interchange in Diluth? How do you possibly answer that question without knowing every tiny detail of both situations?
Now imagine you are a Senator who has to pass judgement on hundreds, perhaps thousands of such issues in a year. Do you think you have even the foggiest of notions of where the money should really be spent? Not a chance. So these decisions get made based on power, who sits on what committee, and how hard a politician is willing to fight for a specific proposal. That in turn often boils down to how badly the constituents want it, which is at least a second-order variable approximating what the project is really worth.
That’s one reason why government is horribly inefficient. It’s not just corruption, or ‘waste, fraud and abuse’. It’s a fundamental, structural inabiity to filter enough information to make reasonable choices. It’s why the Soviet Union couldn’t feed its own people or compete in the world economy. Not necessarily because they were bad guys, but because government systems just aren’t up to the task, and never will be.
Rather than pointing fingers at who’s to blame for the Katrina debacle, it’s worth noting that when the chips were down, government failed at EVERY level. Local, municipal, state, and federal. The failures can be traced through multiple administrations of both parties. This disaster has ripped the facade of competent government wide open and exposed it for what it is. We just need to learn the lesson.
But I’m afraid we won’t. I’m afraid that, politicians being what they are they’ll decide that the ‘fix’ for this is even more government. They’ll decide that they didn’t have enough money, enough control, enough departments, whatever.
If private enterprise had screwed up this badly, the pro-government types would be using this as an example of how the market ‘doesn’t work’ for the next half century.
You could call the public “sheep” but you could also call them greedy. Everybody wants his or her piece of the pie. They’re closing down a National Guard unit that in my area that I would like to see stay (both for greed and the fact they spent a gazilion dollars upgrading the airport. ) It’s truly a magnificent facility that they’re still working on even though it will cease in 2010.
I don’t remember who I heard this from on TV (possibly the WS report on PBS) but they stated there was an buzz in Washington about revisiting the budget.
I understand greed and pork but there should be some method to the madness of distributing funds. Highway systems affect people on a national level so there is logic in building a road THROUGH nowhere but not a highway TO nowhere. In that line of thought, if it’s financially worthwhile to build in New Orleans then they should foot most of the bill for the levee system. We did this in my city with local money and it’s maintained by local taxes. It’s a huge honkin system of dams and levees and the beauty of it is there are no moving parts (city engineers actually come from all over the world to study it).
Also, after looking at Satellite photo’s of New Orleans there doesn’t appear to be a floodgate at both ends of all the canals. WTH? The city is below sea level and they don’t have floodgates? What were the engineers thinking? There’s no reason they couldn’t have narrowed the ends of the canal and installed a simple drop down floodgate. What a waste of Federal dollars.
Sam, I agree with you that this is not a partisan problem. My senators just happen to be Republican.
Some of the most horrible problems in my state don’t relate to transportation and go unsolved.
Example: Tennessee is a hotbed of meth labs. As a result, we have an enormous amount of “meth orphans” – children who have been removed from the dangerous situations and parents. There are so many in Crossville, Tennessee that the responsible agencies haven’t been able to find foster homes for them. The children have been living in jail.
Isn’t it wonderful to be from Senator Frist’s home state?
Back to the bridge to nowhere: I heard that it would be cheaper to buy the residents of the island “executive” style helicopters – one for each citizen – than to build the bridge.
I was with you up to this point.
Of course you are correct in your assessment of the Alaskan Bridges to Nowhere fiasco in that government with money to burn is going to waste it.
But extending this to saying “the Katrina response was proof government doesn’t work” makes two logical leaps. Specifically,
- The fact that government is hopelessly wasteful in building bridges does not necessary mean government is hopelessly wasteful in providing aid to victims of natural disasters. Even you will admit, I am sure, that government is inherently more pointlessly wasteful in some things than in others. This is especially true if you measure government’s wastefulness in comparison to private interests. For instance, government is almost preposterously incompetent at running a commercial business - Ontario Hydro being an amazing, almost comical example. But government actually does an okay job with highways, the Alaskan Bridges to Nowhere aside.
Government is almost always wasteful; the question is whether you get enough utility to make up for it, as opposed to private industry. I am certain private industry could run a cheap armed forces but I am unsure I as a citizen would get as much utility out of a cheap army of mercenaries as I would a professional armed forces. In the case of Ontario Hydro the government delivered no utility whatsoever (pun unintended) a private power corporation couldn’t have. In the case of emergency relief, however, the scope and nature of the task is likely beyond, say, a private insurance company.
- The criticism of Katrina has not generally been “I can’t believe government is wasteful.” The criticism has been specific to this incident in that people perceive - largely correctly - that the government has been much MORE inept in handling Katrina than it was previous disasters. The government has an inevitable place in preventing and ameliorating these sorts of things; what people are upset about is that they seem to be doing a much worse job here than they have done before. This criticism is exacerbated in this case by the stories of genuinely bizarre, almost criminal incompetence on the part of FEMA/DHS, local cops, and Louisiana agencies, as well as the mendacious resume of FEMA’s head honcho, and is further exacerbated in the specific case of the federal government by the fact that their main election plank was that they’d be BETTER at this, not worse (I don’t know what planks the governor or Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans ran on) than their opponents. If you promise to be the best at security, and you do a shit job the first time you’re really tested, you should expect to take the heat.
Granting that the USA never had a while city wiped out before, there’s never been this level of anger and obvious incompetence in the face of a natural disaster relief effort before in recent memory. The criticism of efforts after Hurricane Andrew weren’t 1/100th this great, and they were far less merited, to be honest.
Now, generally speaking, you and I are in full agreement that government should be smaller. In the case of our government, I can think of entire ministries I’d be happy to do away with tomorrow - literally fire every single employee and spend not a penny more on them, ever. But Sam, responding to a natural disaster IS an appropriate role for government in a free society. Protecting and recovering us from catastrophic events is a core role of government. DHS/FEMA/The State of Louisiana/The City of New Orleans failed here due to utter and colossal ineptitude, not because it’s structurally faulty to ask government to provide hurricane relief. And it’s right and proper that DHS and its creator - the President - have taken the brunt of the criticism. For one thing, that’s what DHS exists for.
Picking on the Alaskan Bridges to Nowhere, specifically, as the reason the levees didn’t hold is, in any event, silly. They’re different budget categories, and the amount of money the U.S. federal government wastes every year is orders of magnitude greater; that money could have come from anywhere.
No, really – why is there no bridge linking Juneau to the mainland?
Jobs for whom? how many out-of-work alaskan bridge builders are there? It seems to me that all this bridge is going to do is to attract largely out-of-town workers who’ll work on the bridge and then leave. Sure, local business gets a bit of a boost but how much extra commerce can a town of 8000 handle?
Why? If I were an alaskan, I don’t see how a $233m bridge would benifit me. I’m not living anywhere near the bridge, I’m not planning on ever using the bridge. In fact, I would be rather pissed off that if the good senator was in a position to wrange $233m, he wouldn’t put it towards something that has some obvious benifit. Hell, even giving each Alaskan $10,000 to dig a pot hole and then fill it back up would be preferable to this.
All 50 of them? :dubious:
Yeah, maybe if you were deciding between levees in NO or earthquake prevention in LA, that would have some merit. But this is so blatantly and obviously useless pork that I don’t think it was mere incompetence that got this put in. Even the most dimwitted senator would be able to figure out a million better things to spend this money on. It’s not a problem with well meaning people in a flawed system, it’s a fundamental flaw in how the system is structured and has more to do with the specifics of the situation than any inherent flaw in big government.
Juneau is on the mainland, it just doen’t have a road that goes there.
Ah, but are you aware that there is a proposal in the works to build a road from Juneau to Skagway? Skagway doesn’t want it. Neither does Juneau. It would wind along Lynn Canal, which would be a beautiful drive, but the thing would be prohibitively expensive to keep open in the winter because of the avalanche danger. Not to mention that Juneau is not set up for massive rubber traffic. It’s built on a mountainside and has very narrow streets with limited parking. It’s just another pork project.