[cripplecreek]

I actually agreed with Jenny Granholm on her idea of letting some roads return to dirt. After all, if you don’t have a tax base to maintain a paved road, why do it? If the tax base and traffic increase, then they can be repaved.

I reached that realization as a result of watching them pave all the dirt roads around my hometown more than 20 yeas ago. They weren’t paved because of an increase in traffic, they were paved because oil infrastructure was going in and the heavy trucks were trashing the roads. Once the infrastructure was finished the traffic on those roads returned to the dozen or so cars per day. Yet here we are more than 20 years later, maintaining those paved roads as if they were major highways at a high cost. I live on a dirt street and its not killing me.

My point is that as a nation, we think about this stuff ass backward. We have this idea that we need to keep growing the population to feed an economy (state and federal revenue) when the reality is that revenue and spending should follow population.

[nathanbedford]

My point is that as a nation, we think about this stuff ass backward. We have this idea that we need to keep growing the population to feed an economy (state and federal revenue) when the reality is that revenue and spending should follow population.

Bingo!