It is hard to know sometimes whether I am reading liberal columnist or conservative parody of liberal columnist. The writer even managed to work the "money being spent in Iraq could have fixed this bridge" angle later in the article. You could have counted in seconds how long it would take before the bridge collapse was Bush's fault.
[The bridge collapse] was avoidable."Millions were lost." That damn governor and those stupid voters stole the government's money. A 5-cent gas tax increase would cost me about $145 a year at current gas prices. That's money I'd rather decide on my own how to spend. Watch out for these do-gooders who think that it's okay to tax everyone as long as everyone is being taxed, and don't employ them in your accounting department either.
That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger will follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.
For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair.
UPDATE: Today's Minneapolis StarTribune reports on its front page that Gov. Pawlenty, who previously vetoed a 7.5-cent per gallon tax increase, has agreed to break his No New Taxes pledge and approve a gas tax increase to fund infrastructure construction, despite [as reported yesterday by Rush] a massive current surplus in his state budget - which of course means that the state's citizens are already overtaxed, when even the government can't spend it all.
1 comment:
The last dime cut in taxes is always the first dime that would have been spent to prevent the current situation. I love how every human problem is re-directed as an assault on the greedy taxpayer.
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