Stimulus Spending + Global Warming = Snowdrifts in the Road
What do you get when you combine extravagant stimulus spending with global warming? I’ll tell you what you don’t get: streets you can drive on.
There’s the gold standard of snow and ice removal on major roads in the Midwest — asphalt, plowed smooth and salted for easy driving.
And then there’s the reality this year across the region, and in the Northeast, too, where drivers might be lucky to see bare pavement, and some roads are considered good enough if they have a single defined rut for the tires on one side of a vehicle. A “one-wheel path,” in industry parlance.
With states and localities facing budget cuts in a time of economic crisis, the early onset of severe storms bringing heavy, wet snow is wreaking havoc on already strained resources and raising concerns about public safety.
“Each snowflake looks like a dollar sign floating down,” said Barbara Whitmore, the town clerk in Genesee, Wis., 30 miles west of Milwaukee. “We are basically now trying to just do hills, curves and intersections rather than entire roads for salting. Everything is plowed but might not get down to bare concrete. People like to see the salt so it gets down to bare concrete, but the cost is too high.”
Many other counties, cities and states across the regions are also feeling the pinch of expensive storm cleanup — rationing of salt, not plowing side roads, canceling public works projects for fear of running out of money to clear the roads.
Less road maintenance means more accidents — and there are fewer people to clean them up.
Beyond transportation departments, the ranks of first responders had already been reduced in some areas because of budget cuts and mandatory leave. In some states, troopers and highway patrol officers are having a hard time keeping up with accidents on unusually slick roads. …
“We don’t have enough officers to handle all the accidents,” said Doug Cutts, a trooper with the Iowa State Patrol. “We had multicar pileups, up to 10 vehicles involved in crashes. We just went from one crash to the next crash to the next crash.”
Meanwhile — as the handful of legitimate government responsibilities are conspicuously neglected — Big Government has been spending our money, our children’s money, and our grandchildren’s money by the $trillions in the name of “stimulus.” Where does our money go? Only our socialist rulers and their bailed-out cronies know for sure.
On a tip from Scott. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.