From the White House down through Congress and into the homes of grieving families who lost loved ones in the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the nation is bemoaning the lack of maintenance that allowed an aging bridge to collapse. If history is a judge, anguish will vanish soon and Americans will go back to ignoring deteriorating public facilities.
The chief naysayer is President Bush. He is long on sorrow for the Minneapolis tragedy, but opposed to raising gasoline taxes between 1 and 5 cents per gallon for a crash program to rehabilitate thousands of bridges, dams, waterworks and other public facilities that are in many cases 50 years old and perils to the public. The 18.4-cent federal tax was set in 1993.
Raising taxes would hurt the economy, Bush insists, an embarrassing indicator of his narrow view of economic costs versus benefits.
He's squandering money in Iraq by the billions, with benefits yet to emerge. And this is just the beginning. Ahead are years of costly hospitalization and disability benefits for tens of thousands of maimed U.S. service personnel, more billions to rebuild cities destroyed in the war and more billions in security forces permanently stationed in the Iraq neighborhood.
The nation's crumbling infrastructure of public facilities is costing the nation dearly in insurance payments for accidents caused by roads and bridges in disrepair and in traffic delays that consume billions of dollars of unnecessary fuel.
Were Congress to approve a gasoline tax boost and show the courage to override a presidential veto, a vast crash program of infrastructure rehabilitation and restoration could begin.
Hundreds of thousands of workers would be unleashed on projects. New heavy equipment would be built and purchased. Materials by the hundreds of millions of tons would be manufactured and sold. Companies and workers would pay taxes.
And the same sort of local and national economic benefits generated by President Eisenhower's 1950s launch of the interstate highway system would be repeated and multiplied.
Consider this: When the interstate program began in the 1950s, the nation's population was 169 million and there were 54 million registered vehicles.
Today, the country is 300 million-plus in population and has an astonishing 230,428,326 personal and commercial vehicles wearing down roads and bridges that can be 50 years old or more.
More than 770 of Idaho's 4,062 bridges are listed as deficient. Of 1,761 bridges maintained by the state, 339 are at least 50 years old.
Idahoans should refrain from feeling safe—and rethink the meaning of frugal.
