Tight Budgets or Tight Wads?

Yesterday, when I was listening to a news broadcast on MSNBC about the Minnesota bridge collapse into the Mississippi River, I heard conservative commentator Tucker Carlson introduce the subject by asking if, in "this era of tight budgets," we needed to give over the maintenance of our highways to private companies? Would they not do better than the government?

That's the conservative answer for everything. Privatize.

In other words, let's give the rich in this country another chance to make billions of more dollars than they already make, holding the country's infrastructure as hostage. Oh, yes: sounds great to me. (Not. Or as my best friend would say, "N't.")

Nick Miroff reports: "Once the sturdy pride of post-war America, the federal interstate system is now a vast network of aging roads and bridges, including many -- such as the span that collapsed in Minneapolis -- that engineers consider deficient or obsolete.

Despite record spending on highways, experts and engineers said federal funds aren't enough to save the interstate system's half-century old bridges and 47,000 miles of highway from further decay, as a network designed to connect the nation teeters under a crush of commuter traffic."

What are we going to do? We are so poor as a nation, and have to have "tight budgets," right? There's little hope, because we just can't afford to do it, right?

That's the impression that's given with California's education budget all the time, too. You would think that my job hangs in the balance every semester because the state just can't afford to fund the system.

But listen to this telling comment from Robert Poole, director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation and an adviser to the Federal Highway Administration: ""We're falling further and further behind. We're prospering as a nation, driving more as commuters and shipping more goods, and that's pounding the highways and wearing them out."

The key words here are: "We're prospering as a nation."

So, why do we have tight budgets?

The answer is because of an ideology. It's a conservative ideology that demands tight government budgets, because it hates government. I can see the rich wanting no government, because it takes all the restrictions off of them, and whatever government doesn't do, they get to make money off of in the government's place. But so many lower- to middle-income people have bought into this ideology. One reason is that government has a tendency to become wasteful. There's no doubt about that. And for many things, the competition of the marketplace makes for more efficiency. But for our roads? How are we going to have market competition for a highway? Bidding? Do we really want the care of our roads to always go to the lowest bidder? I don't think so.

In response to Tucker Carlson's question, former Congressman Tom Andrews (D-Maine), said something very interesting. There are two things that have to go into the planning of a budget, he said. First, you have to look at what's wasteful, and you weed it out to save money. But second, you look at your goals, and you invest toward the accomplishment of those goals. It's the second part of that plan that government is now failing to do.

Conservative ideology is often the cause of the government's failure to do its job well. If you under-fund everything, and demand that the primary emphasis is always on pruning what doesn't work, then you'll find that government efficiency will go down in an ever-downward spiral. On some things, like the Social Security system, it has often been said that it is the Bush Administration's policy to undermine the system so that they can eventually privatize it. It makes you wonder if it isn't a conservative plan to undermine government in general, so that everything can be privatized.

There are some elements of our society, like our infrastructure, that we don't want thrown into the market. This is especially so in the case where there can be no market mechanism except selling to the lowest bidder. In these cases, we have to cut wasteful spending, to be sure, but we also have to invest toward the accomplishment of our goals.