Patch, patch, patch. That's what's in store for State Highway 75 in the Sun Valley area, the Idaho Department of Transportation announced last week.
Anticipated federal budget cuts led the ITD to forecast that there won't be enough money for the $250 million highway expansion and improvement project that has been in the works for a decade. Only one small section near Timber Way south of St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center is still slated for construction in 2013.
The ITD plans on losing 30 percent, or $92 million of $306 million in federal funding. Its entire annual budget is $738.6 million.
The loss of the highway project is a blow to the state's premier summer and winter resort area, which has long needed road and air access improvements.
It took nearly 30 years for the valley and the ITD to agree on a highway design. The valley sent the ITD packing in 1974 when it wanted to lay down a freeway. A modified urban highway finally emerged as a solution after decades of wrangling.
ITD is not inflicting the blow. Congress is inflicting it with its refusal to balance the federal budget in any other way except cutting expenses.
Congress has long refused to increase the federal gas tax, even when gas prices were low. The debt-ceiling agreement inked this month calls on Congress to make deep, deep cuts in funding for everything from human services to the military—with little impetus for increasing taxes on the super-rich or corporations.
It would take more space than this to list the ways in which State Highway 75 is substandard. Yet, State Highway 75 is apparently the picture of the future that we, as a nation, are choosing to embrace.
In the face of major unemployment, the public seems content in the knowledge that America is becoming a nation of bad roads, poor education, dirty air and water, skimpy human health services and scarce research into matters of public welfare.
Last week, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter told Fox News that the state's bare-bones, take-your-sour-medicine budget is a model for what the nation ought to do.
On the contrary. It's a shameful budget balanced on the backs of children, the disabled and the elderly.
Even billionaire Warren Buffett again this week called for making the wealthy pay more by changing the grossly unfair federal tax policies that leave his companies' employees paying a lot more in taxes as a percentage of their income than he does as an investor.
Right on, Mr. Buffett.
