When vehicles plunged into the Mississippi River three weeks ago as a bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, focus turned to the nation’s bridges. When two years ago the levees crumbled in New Orleans the focus turned to the state of the nation’s flood control system. Bottom line: What is the state of America’s infrastructure?
Not good. Yet, as Edmund Contosti reveals, lack of money, despite the yelps of politicians, is not really the problem. Massive amounts of dollars are appropriated from the American taxpayer under the guise of dealing with transportation and other infrastructure maintenance that are then massively redirected to pet projects that bear only a tangential relationship to the purpose for which the money is taken. New projects, rather than the current operational structures are given priority, resulting in levee collapses and disintigrating bridges.
Such also is the fate of the nation’s health care dollars. Rather than actual health care needs priority is given to flashy ephemera such as anti-smoking and reducing obesity campaigns. Every medically related junk study and program designed to impose behavior control steal dollars from health care just as "bridges to nowhere" guarantee that collapsing bridges will soon "be the norm."
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