A bridge (or two) too far

The bridge collapse in Minnesota is not directly Duhbya's fault, but the anti-government environment he and his fellow conservatives have engendered for thirty-five years has succeeded in giving us a media environment in which it's just impossible to imagine actually solving the problem of deferred maintenance (just another form of deficit spending).

Here's Time's take on the insoluble problem:

It would be so expensive to fix hundreds of thousands of bridges that it's just not going to happen. But these numbers highlight the problem of the nation's infrastructure. No word is likely to make taxpayers' eyes glaze over more quickly. As a result, officials at all levels of government tend to defer maintenance on bridges and roadways; the voters wouldn't stand for the required expenditures, estimated at more than $9 billion a year. They might, however, be willing to pay for more frequent and thorough inspections, which could distinguish the structurally deficient bridges in imminent danger of failure from those that aren't.

Some liberal media! Remember when the press reported facts about what had already happened and let the future take care of itself. There was always another day to report the new events of that day.

While I'm skeptical that $9 billion a year would be enough, that's not a lot compared to Iraq. Maybe we'd need more than one month's worth of the cost of that clusterf**k.