10,000 deaths each year can be blamed on congress' refusal to fund infrastructure

[spanone]

About 10,000 motorists die each year because of inadequate road conditions, and millions of other Americans waste large portions of their lives stuck in traffic or stalled trains. The enormous cost to society of poor infrastructure grows every year, and most of the blame can be placed directly on a Congress that refuses to collect and spend enough money to fix it.

On Tuesday the House made the situation worse with a sad excuse for a highway funding bill: A 10-month measure that keeps spending at an inadequate level and does not address the dwindling revenues that keep producing all-too-familiar cliffhanging crises. The bill pays for building projects through a series of budget gimmicks, including one that will probably result in companies underfinancing their pensions. Yet the Obama administration, desperate to avoid the cancellation of projects that would occur if the Highway Trust Fund runs out of money next month, decided to support the stopgap bill.

This crisis was entirely foreseeable and was brought about by the ideological refusal of Congressional Republicans to raise the gasoline tax — the traditional method of paying for road projects, because it allows those who benefit from better roads to pay for them. The gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, and during those 21 years it has lost 39 percent of its value to inflation. But Republicans, afraid of violating a no-tax-increase pledge they made to an extremist group, won’t touch it. “I’ve never supported raising the gas tax,” Speaker John Boehner said last week.

Without an increase, the trust fund will continually run out of money, jeopardizing one of the most basic functions of government. If the fund were allowed to run dry next month, it would cut federal transportation financing to the states by 28 percent, and slow or stop 100,000 projects that employ about 700,000 workers at the height of the construction season. That would be fine with hard-right Republicans who want Washington to get out of the transportation business and leave the states on their own; they have overseen an unprecedented 20 percent cut in construction spending over the last five or six years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/16wed1.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0

[orwell]

1. Ah yes...

"Pro Life" RepuglaCons.

[yeoman6987]

3. I wish Nancy would have raised the tax

when we had the House. Well maybe in November when we get the House back with our GOTV program that will overwhelm the polling places....I hope.

[spanone]

4. pro nothing

[Manifestor_of_Light]

2. Also cost of tires, suspensions, accidents.

Besides the human toll. Lots of spending on car repairs etc.

Damn third world country we are living in.

[caraher]

5. That 10,000 figure is pretty questionable

The NYT piece links to a White House report that actually says,

Underinvestment impacts safety too. There were more than 33,000 traffic fatalities last year alone and roadway conditions are a significant factor in approximately one-third of traffic fatalities. Such fatalities occur disproportionately in rural America, in part because of inadequate road conditions.

This does not mean that having roads in perfect condition would have prevented fatalities in 1/3 of deadly traffic accidents; most likely, many of them would have resulted in deaths anyway, as there are many contributing factors in any one crash.

Still, we do need to fix our infrastructure, as much for economic reasons as road safety!

[coyote]

6. Surely all part of the plan to say

"Hey government cannot manage our infrastructure, we need to privatize the infrastructure...lets sell off the the highways and stick to the taxpayers (i.e private tolls, creative fees, etc)

[Wounded Bear]

7. This ^^^

Starve it and sell off the carcase. That's the repub way.