Over the weekend, the Strib seemed to all but declare “low taxes” the culprit behind the bridge collapse.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writes for the Center of the American Experiment:

But for any connection to hold, at least one of the following conditions would have to be true, when not a single one is.

It would have to be demonstrated, for instance, that decisions by the Minnesota Department of Transportation about what to do about the bridge — whether to repair it, how to repair it, when to repair it — were made on the basis of what such steps might cost. But I know of no evidence that money played any role in determining what state officials or anyone else did or didn’t do in maintaining the bridge.

Likewise, to draw any suspect connection between the collapse and the consistent preference of large numbers of Minnesotans to hold the line on taxes, one would have to assume that inspectors and other officials charged with protecting and serving allowed anything other than their professionalism to determine how they gauged the sturdiness and fragility of the state’s infrastructure. Without a morsel of evidence that any of them compromised their integrity, it’s slanderous to imply that any of them did.

And then, of course, even if Pawlenty broke his no-tax pledge 20 minutes after taking office in 2003, and even if MnDOT’s budget doubled in a single bound, does anyone really believe that federal, state and local bureaucracies would have moved fast enough so that anything other than maybe talking about a new 35W bridge would have happened by now?

Oh, and I have a fearless prediction; last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”. 

That’s where my money is…

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 4:47 am and is filed under Bridge Collapse, Minnesota Politics, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.