Grow up. If you want a bridge to connect you to Anchorage, get Alaska to pay for it. It isn't New York's job to pay for your infrastructure. I still pay tolls on my bridges and highways.
Should first be a toll ferry paid by users. If growth indicates the need for a bridge, make it a toll bridge paid for by the users. The Causeway and Crescent City Connection in New Orleans are both structures built and paid for with toll fares, plus we have toll ferries up and down the river.
It still does.
Need em so bad? Try tapping into that 30 BILLION pile of dough Alaska is sitting on.
Sounds like an issue for Alaskans. Let me know how it works out, but don't ask me to pay for it.
So should every remote village get $250 million in taxpayer funds, or are you special?
So move already, whiner!
And you point is valid if in fact the bridge is opening up a large chunk of prime land that is now unusable...after all New Orleans and a good part of the gulf coast is “nowhere” right now it unusable land until the infrastructure is built/rebuilt…
Built a bridge to prime land is far more logical that building a levy around a swamp to keep it dry or building bridge and roads and orher public infrastructure below what is hurricane storm surge line
You are nuts if you think that the IRS should take my tax dollars at gunpoint so 50 of your state citizens can have a bridge to get off their island.
I don't mind Alaska getting its share of the federal pie ( though I'd prefer if we just did away with the federal pie entirely ). But its going to have to have some purpose. For that kind of capital investment of my tax dollars I demand a better return that 50 people being happy about it.
Good Lord.
It seem everyone here is falling for this "Bridge to nowhere" line. It is so easy to lie with statistics. Any statistic about Alaska can be made to look very bad if you divide by population. Try looking at spending per mile of coastline and reality is put into perspective (Alaska has 6 times the coastline of the lower 48 states) we come out dead last when it come to federal spending on ports, bridges, and harbors. This trick has been used by the liberals for years to make a good conservative like Senator Stevens look like a pork monger.
Another frequently used trick is to compare federal spending with " income tax revenue", where it is easy to show that the feds spend a lot more than comes in from "taxes" due to the tiny population here. It is easy to conveniently ignore the millions upon millions of dollars in natural resource revenues (technically not taxes in libspeak) from the oil, mining and fishing industries. (Federal leasing fees from ANWR alone are projected to be 2.6 BILLION dollars from the 90% federal share).
Most Alaskans are used to this. We have our own "Hate Stevens" crowd of liberals here, kind of a subset of the hate Bush/Hate America type that would love nothing better than to see Stevens replaced with a liberal like Tony Knowles.
Even if you don,t believe me take heart, the envirowackos and their New York lawyers will be on this project like flies on feces and the likely-hood is that it will be shut down for "environmental" reasons (we might have the audacity to develop some of the "pristine wilderness" on Gravinia island). and we will spend millions (of state money) to fight it. and as in most cases where we try to develop things here, loose.
Let the Alaskans develop their land and resources (and keep the revenue) and there would no need for any federal spending here.
Pay for your own bridges. And Boston should pay for their own whole in the ground. All pork is wasteful crap.
I don't my state taking it either. If we, as citizens of my state, decide we want something we should raise the money ourselves or do without.
Also, why don't you just spend your state's one year payoff of oil royalties given to every citizen? It's the cost of the bridge.
You're just an easy target. Have no doubt that the people who are criticizing you on this thread are represented by people who are bringing home pork to their districts as well.
Isn't there a cheaper way to do it than to build a $250 million bridge?
Acquiring Alaska was a strategic move for an earlier time when foot soldiers were a greater threat; later, the natural resources proved to be of considerable value so development followed along the cost/benefit trail.
Now, we're stuck with a vocal set of freeloaders represented by some relocated professional politicians dreaming of sunshine while apparently addicted to moonshine; the place ain't livable, give it up, already. :)
Not one word of this screed is at all relevant to the question of why this should be paid for by the federal government, rather than the Alaska state government or the local government or even (Ghu forbid) a private developer hoping to get in on the ground floor of that "many square miles of flat land that could be developed".