How the left purveys sprawl

Few issues make the blood of liberal Democrats boil hotter than suburban sprawl, which they claim is responsible for a plethora of social, cultural, economic, public-health and environmental woes. They blame sprawl on the creation of the federal highway system during the Eisenhower administration, even though the suburbanization of America was well under way before the 1950s.

Sprawl actually is a sign of prosperity. Generations of Americans have fled the cities because they were fed up with the overpaying for cramped urban apartments so they could walk or bike through crime-ridden neighborhoods to get to work, stores and restaurants.

We find liberals' complaints about sprawl curious. They are huge fans of Big Government, and virtually every problem they associate with sprawl has its own Big Government program, office or agency, each with its own vault full of tax dollars for the benefit of liberal special interests and constituencies. If reversing sprawl would create the liberal utopia, then Eden wouldn't be all that heavenly because it would have legions of unemployed liberals.

But when was the last time you heard liberals decry sprawl? Not recently, and there's a reason for that. America is mired in its worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Usually, liberals complain America has more sprawl-inducing infrastructure than it can afford. But suddenly, they believe the road to recovery is paved with asphalt, spread and rolled exclusively by Big Labor. (Unspoken is the understanding that Recovery Road will be neglected by Big Government and Big Public Labor, thereby creating more "shovel-ready" work for Big Labor down the road.)

When President Obama announced his latest "jobs initiative" last week, it looked a lot like his 2009 "stimulus," which spent hundreds of billions to build and upgrade roads and bridges to no economic avail. That's because public-infrastructure projects are economically neutral at best. In financing its "stimulus," the Obama administration first drew nearly $800 billion out of the economy before putting it back in, minus billions lost to ubiquitous waste and fraud, and billions more skimmed off by governments at all levels to cover their overhead. The "stimulus" benefited governments and construction unions, but few others because it lacked the ripple effect of money invested in economically productive work carried out by the private sector.

Consequently, the "stimulus" failed as promised to lift the economy or reduce unemployment, and it will never succeed no matter how many times liberals try it. Yet even liberals who usually believe roads and bridges are evil sprawl-enablers are ready to double-down on this failed strategy because infrastructure projects give sprawling governments a shovel-ready excuse to spend, borrow and tax more. And more spending, borrowing and taxes mean more money for liberal causes and candidates.

These journalist constantly talk about the $800 billion stimulus as if that's all there was. Obama has been spending $1.4 trillion dollars a YEAR more than he's been taking in. That's essentially all “stimulus” as its being injected into the economy and being borrowed from the future. That's nearly $4 trillion dollars shoved into the economy since Obama started that the economy didn't produce - all borrowed. That's far, far beyond the $800 billion they say he wasted.

Well, if the cash was actually spent - which a lot of it wasn't - this argument needs a little rebuttal. The bridges and roads that were built in the 1940's and 1950's and haven't been seriously upgraded since then do need work. And not just the local ones, the interstates (which everyone uses) do need work. Bridges that carry I-70, I-10, I-55 and many others get a lot of stress daily and the fatigue will kill them. I live in a metropolitan area on a state line where four interstates come across the backbone of the interior waterways on one bridge. Of all the bridges in this area - and there are a lot of them - it's in the worst shape. Fortunately, the states worked out a deal with some federal help and there's a new I-70 bridge under construction that's going to take a lot of the pressure off. That's INTERSTATE 70, one of the three that goes across the country and is used extensively by trucks to transport goods nationwide, thus continuing commerce.

BTW, also in my neck of the woods, it's the far 'burbs where the crime wave is. Here in the inner-ring, the criminals tend to stay in their own 'hoods. It's different, but life doesn't go by a script.

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