On Tap

What are government’s core functions? This is the philosophical question of the ages. There is no perfect answer. For my money (literally), government’s three most important tasks are (1) Maintaining the armed forces to keep up safe from foreign threats; (2) Exercising its police powers to prevent crime and maintain order; and (3) Building and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps commerce flowing.

So this story from Popular Mechanics (ht: Glenn, natch), caught my interest.

It’s no secret that federal, state and local government have all basically ignored infrastructure issues for about the last fifty years. So it should be no great surprise that our infrastructure is crumbling. Meanwhile, we keep asking government to pay for all sorts of extraneous crap.

It’s time to get off the dime and get this stuff fixed. That means getting our priorities straight. But we desperately need more roads, bridges, and rail, and we’ve got to fix the big stuff that’s out there decaying even as we speak. Traffic in big cities is already having a tremendous impact on commerce, and that’s bad for all of us. Not to mention the hours Americans spend stuck in cars instead of doing more important things.

So, note to politicians: grow some backbone, and get busy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at April 8, 2008 - 3:45 pm and is filed under 2008 Presidential Campaign, Politics, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.