Your cheap talk caused the TTF crisis: Now own it

Let's call them the irresponsibles.

Those abominable know-it-alls with the flip answers in their back pockets.  Those cheap charlatans who never fact check their prescriptions.  The belching bar stool prognosticators who get their insights from the scratchings on rest room stalls.

Those who throw the "Reason Report" around the way a earlier group of brain monkeys chanted "WMD's" can look on their good work this week.  Road work stopped, boulders falling into the street in Andover Township.  Good job.

Good job too for all those who own the slogan that you shouldn't "throw money" at something.  Sure.  When they're hungry, they don't "throw money" at the problem.  They don't go to a supermarket to buy food, or to a restaurant to buy food, they go out and forage, hunt for it, and with their skill set maybe find some carrion on the road.  Rather than "throw money" at it, that is what they do.

A 105-year old bridge is falling down in Byram.  Now the rhetoric begins.  One politician (who has tried and tried again) blames the Governor instead of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Yes, that basic principle, familiar in everyday life, the universal law of decay.  Ultimately everything falls apart and disintegrates over time.  Material things are not eternal.  But no, according to this hip-pocket amateur, non-civil engineer, it's the Governor.  Then, after the bridge crumbles, a local elected politician chimes in with that sad, unimaginative rendition of "let's not throw money" at the problem. 

OK, I'm with you, let's not.   So now what are you going to do?  And don't say find another source of money, because that would be "throwing money at it" too -- the only difference is that it is different money.  OK dumb asses, how are you going to fix the bridge?  Volunteers?  Maybe that would work.  First, you could ask local businesses to donate the materials needed.  Then, you could canvass all the residents of Byram to find people qualified to build a bridge -- or anything, for that matter.  Heavy equipment costs money, but hey, the pyramids were built by hand, without heavy equipment.  Well, they cost a few thousand or thousands of dead slaves, but you didn't actually have to hire slaves, did you?  So maybe Byram could press its citizens into service?  We can see it now.  The early morning call ups and those long lines of Byramese hauling cement and stones to the building site.  Oh, what happy days!

Or... you could throw money at it.

Fortunately, there are some state and local elected officials who understand basic math.  They understand that the gas tax hasn't been raised since 1988. They know, as everyone knows, that you can't buy much in 2016 at the price you paid in 1988. 

The 14 1/2 cents per gallon of gasoline we paid to repair our roads and bridges in 1988 would be 29 cents today just on account of inflation.  Now add on to that the 10 1/2 cents needed to pay interest on the debt -- because instead of paying as we went we put it on a credit card -- and you'll have some idea of what we need to pay per gallon to maintain and repair our roads and bridges.  

Some choose to be ignorant of this.  They try to change the subject by claiming that they pay too much in other taxes.  And they are right.  You do pay too much OTHER taxes -- just not enough to fix our roads and bridges.  So do something to cut those OTHER taxes.  Don't complain about what you're not paying enough of.

It's like having a mortgage that you are paying too much a month for.  You don't head into a restaurant and tell the waiter that your mortgage payment is too high so can you have the menu at 1988 prices please.  Do you?  What you do is pay the 2016 price for your dinner and then go renegotiate your mortgage. 

Do something that corrects the problem, don't compound the problem by creating a problem somewhere else.  And don't rely on silly rhetoric to cover up a lack of will, a lack of courage, a lack of honesty, and a lack of brains.