Robert Prather, in the process of a move, has driven through Missouri and has criticized Missouri Department of Transportation’s expenditures on our highways here in the “Show Me the Tax Subsidy Money State.”
Robert said, as a bullet point in his post:
1. Missouri woefully underspends on its highways if I-55 is any indicator; there was a high positive correlation between the remains of blown tires and bumps in the road.
Well, he’s just a passerby, trashing our state’s foolish spending policies. In a comment on his site, I showed him how we residents do it:
Rest assured, Robert, that MoDOT’s right now spending ludicrous amounts of money to put together a five-year plan to road maintenance, just like last year, and its well-paid consultants offer the following advice, again:
- Build more $600 million dollar bridges like the Page Avenue Extension to ferry affluent St. Charles suburban types into their jobs in St. Louis without the hassle of mass transit, which would not only bring them across the Missouri River into St. Louis, but could also bring St. Louis undesirables into the affluent areas;
- Put up more soundproofing barriers so suburbanites who bought houses next to a highway don’t have to deal with the decibel consequences of the low house price;
- Hire more administrators to devise more five-year plans;
- Raise taxes some how, some way.
- Slap a couple inches of asphalt on a couple lanes of highway, which will smooth that stretch until the next day in which the temperature climbs to ninety degrees or drops below thirty degrees.
But did you happen to notice, as you passed through St. Louis, any of the state-of-the-art public/private sports facilities, such as the Kiel Savvis Center, the Trans World Edward Jones Dome, or the site of the soon-to-be-built baseball stadium? If so, the legislators and powers-that-be hope, you would soon forget the obligations of the state government ignored to provide these amenities!
