Recipe for Disaster

Inaction has its consequences. From Attytood:

WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday proposed deep cuts to federal health care, education, and transportation programs, searching for new money in the federal budget to pay for increasingly costly defense programs and the war in Iraq.
-- Boston Globe, Feb. 6, 2007.

WASHINGTON - The White House said Thursday that an inspection two years ago found structural deficiencies in the highway bridge that buckled during evening rush hour in Minneapolis.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the Interstate 35W span rated 50 on a scale of 120 for structural stability.

"This doesn't mean there was a risk of failure, but if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions," he said. The bridge was 40 years old.
-- AP, Aug. 2, 2007.

A 2005 federal study found that the bridge was "structurally deficient."

"A structurally deficient bridge might be one not adequate for the traffic it takes, but not necessarily dangerous," Burnett (former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board) said. "But a lot of structurally deficient bridges are dangerous."

Burnett said he believed it would be the state's responsibility to check on the bridge in light of those reports. But he conceded that there could be a federal role and an issue of whether fed standards are adequate.
-- Scripps News, Aug. 2, 2007.

Recipe for disaster: Find a problem. Ignore it (for over two years).

We were warned about New Orleans–we knew the levees wouldn't hold. But funding for their repair was cut, and the money diverted to Iraq.

We were warned about our bridges, and our crumbling infrastructure. But there is no money to pay for the repairs–it has all been diverted to Iraq, and to fund huge tax cuts for the richest of the rich.

Then again, what did you people expect, when you continue to vote for a party that doesn't believe in government, and is hell bent on PROVING that government doesn't work?