Death By Tax Cut

Rick Perlstein, who's obsessed over sinkholes and the connection to our broken infrastructure, highlights this bit about which I was unaware:

When I read this on this weekend's floods in today's New York Times I did a double take:

In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty said six people had died, some of them when their vehicles fell into sinkholes in roadways...

The astonishment: As many as six more! That would make for a death toll from faulty roadways in Minnesota of possibly a dozen in Minnesota over a three-week period alone—two years after Tim Pawlenty put on a dumb show for Grover Norquist style conservatives, holding up a giant prop "VETO" stamped as he cancelled an extra $300 million a year for the Minnesota Department of Transportation because it involved a small tax increase. As I wrote two weeks ago, he addressed himself at the ceremony to the public-spirited Minnesota legislatures who dared suggested that Minnesota's roads and bridges needed work: "How dumb can they be?"

In fact, we now know that this love of ideological conservatism over public safety stopped the bridge in Minnesota from being fixed even after they knew it was in bad shape:

The men and women whose job was to ensure the safety of Bridge 9340 were meeting once again. Just after noon on Dec. 6, they filed into a conference room in Roseville to divvy up the final prep work for a dangerous steel reinforcement project high above the Mississippi River.
A senior engineer was going to pull property records in order to contact landowners beneath the bridge. Detours were coming for West River Road. The Coast Guard was about to get heaps of paperwork on what tasks would be done from the river channel. Truck drivers would soon learn of pending weight restrictions.

It appeared that the most studied bridge in Minnesota, the focus of worrisome inspection reports for a decade, was finally going to have its most glaring weaknesses fixed.

But five weeks later, all those preparations stopped. In a single conference call on Jan. 17, the same consultants who said reinforcement plates were needed to strengthen the bridge cautioned MnDOT that drilling for the retrofit could weaken it.

"That was the turning point. That's where we turned the ship 180 degrees," said state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan.

Internal MnDOT documents reviewed by the Star Tribune reveal that last year bridge officials talked openly about the possibility of the bridge collapsing -- and worried that it might have to be condemned.

They knew. And if you read the whole article you'll see suggestions that money was a consideration in halting the fixes. So we can now put a price on the 6 lives that were lost when the bridge collapsed. As if it's less expensive now to rebuild the whole thing.

Conservatives are the least patriotic people imaginable. A patriot would actually try to do something for their fellow American, rather than leaving them in danger. Right-wing policies of abandoning responsibility have led to deaths and suffering, and also a need to spend MORE to fix the responsibilities previously abandoned. It's dangerous and stupid.