Priorities

Its not how much money the government takes in; its the priorities for its use that are important.

This was brought home to me very powerfully yet again by the news of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Minnesota August 1, 2007.

Every year, at all levels of government we hear city councils, state legislatures and the federal congress arguing over various aspects of their budgets. The arguments are usually confined to a discussion of how each party can give us everything we think we want from the government without having to pay for it. There's a lot of discussion concerning not raising taxes under any circumstances rather than making a determination as to whether a desirable effort may be worth the extra money.

There's seldom a public discussion about (among many other things) the desperate need for routine maintenance, repair and replacement of our infrastructure in this country. Our roads, bridges, rails, the air traffic control system, sewers, water pipes, power plants of various types are all aging. Many of these sytems are at or past their design life.

Everytime there is a catastrophic failure of some system somewhere (such as that bridge in Minneapolis); there is a lot of talk about the obvious (in between the sad stories of the victims) between groups of experts stating the problem yet again as if it were new and politicians making solemn promises to address the issue; promises they seem to forget as they leave the television studio.

Will it be different this time? I'd like to hope so. I'd like to think we'd finally 'gotten it'; that we'd finally figured out that it cheaper in the long run to take care of the dull routine necessary activities on a regular basis and by so doing avoid the need to spend the billions to not only rebuild the failed system but repair or replace the collateral damage and compensate the dead and injured.

Unfortunately, preventive maintainance and repair don't look sexy on campaign ads. In fact the discussion is down right boring. But consider one statistic thrown out during the current talk; one-third of our bridges in this, the riches country on the planet, are considered "stucturally deficient". We're all familiar with our favorite potholes.

When will we learn to talk and yes, argue if necessary, about what matters? When will we talk about priorities, what's truely important.