The US Senate Votes For Pork Over Highway Safety
Yep that’s what they did. From Captains Quarters:
Senator Tom Coburn attempted to stop the pork party, to no avail. He offered an amendment that would have forbidden earmarks on transportation bills until all deficient bridges had been properly updated. That just barely failed—by a vote of 82 to 14. Eighty-two Senators voted to prioritize pork over infrastructure maintenance.
Now what could be more important then spending transportation money on highway safety? I can’t think of a thing but the Senate thinks that “safety be damned. It’s their money and they’ll spend it the way they want to. Oh, and send more money so they can waste more of it.”
By the way there’s a North Dakota connection here:
Want to know what had to be cut from the bill in order to get the North Dakota Peace Garden? Oh, just a silly little project that would have updated technology in air-traffic control towers.
Now someday I may actually get to the Peace Garden with my family. And it very well might deserve funding in the way that National Parks get funded. But I do think that maybe it’s just a bit better to make our air traffic control system safer than planting a bunch of flowers.
Every family has tradeoffs. The government doesn’t look at it that way. If the politicians want something it’s a need for us to make sacrifices to pay for.
