3/26/'08

This pothole slalom season has been a lulu. I've never seen one start so early and go so long.
As usual it started all at once after one of our many, many snow storms this winter. A little freeze and thaw to soften up the pavement, a little snow then run the old town plow over the top a few times and - VOILA! - instant potholes.

Right off the bat the Park Place triangle was an intermediate level course while most of the rest of our roads were bunny slopes where a gentle left and right of the old steering wheel takes your vehicle gently around the offending void. A few storms/weeks later the ease of working your way through the craters without losing your coffee onto the windshield rose to black diamond level and beyond. I have begun to name some of the more impressive entrants in this year's pothole list - some even printable. There's one on Canal ST. below the hospital - more of an area of holes than a single divot - I call "the Valley of the Shadow of Death" - I shall not walk there, but drive carefully...

If there's a silver lining to this bumpy driving - well for one it isn't mud. I'll take a stretch of black diamond level potholed pavement over Sunset Lake Road mud in mud season any day (and thank my lucky stars...). Also there may be commercial possibilities here - don't laugh. Consider for a minute Brattleboro's annual entrepreneurial bonanza based on the humble heifer. Surely the geniuses that make hay from poopy quadrapeds could achieve monetary glory with the gravely sploosh of a pothole. Pothole hats. Pothole shirts. An mixed drink called "the pothole". Maybe a MacNeils variety - "Pothole Porter". A whole pothole festival! Imagine a state wide pothole contest - a single test driver and car with a 12 oz. cup o' joe in the cup holder drives 5 miles of each entrant city's main streets - no slalom allowed - and the city with the least coffee left wins and claims the title of Potholiest City in Vermont and gets to take a potholier than thou attitude toward the rest of us.
My money would be on Brattleboro this year.

Then again...

is there a deeper message here?

Is this a sign that the Republican assault on all things governmental is having an impact? I was going to try to tie our poverty with regard to road and bridge repairs to misplaced priorities in Iraq and I don't think that's an impossible case to make. The $500 billion we've spent in Iraq so far (my guess is it's really twice that, at least) certainly could have accomplished something positive here at home instead of helping turn a peaceful, secular Arab nation into a fundamentalist Islamic Shiite state with bloody tribal war playing out in the streets each day. A couple of numbers stopped me cold: the U.S.A. budget deficit for February 2008 was $175,000,000,000; the interest on the debt for 2007 was $429,000,000,000. The first number I got from the Center for American Progress - they send out a fact filled blurb from www.americanprogressaction.org a couple times a week. Think about it. $175 bill DEFICIT. As in we took in "x" amount tax dollars spent "y" and had a deficit of $175 billion FOR A SINGLE MONTH! That's insane. It also clearly has very little to do with the $10 or $20 billion we spend monthly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration won't help individual homeowners caught in the subprime mortgage fiasco because "we can't afford it". Get serious! We already are spending money we can't afford to spend: what are we getting for it?

Health care for everyone? No. Thank you, Hill & Billary.

Welfare? No. Bill all but did away with that with his "workfare" program back in the 90's.

Military? Maybe. I keep reading that if we were attacked we don't have a single soldier left to defend our shores, they're all worn down from 5 years of Iraq war. They don't have the stuff they need, despite the fact that over 50% the non Social Security & Medicare budget is for the Pentagon, and what that money buys is hush -hush, top secret... So, we have to guess whether the spending is appropriate or not (not, I say).

Social Security? 40 cents of every dollar the government takes in is FICA - dollars specically collected for Social Security - and of that, 25 cents is benefits. The rest is lent back to the gov. for all that other stuff...

CIA and spying and stuff: Hmmmm...my feeling has been for years that we should dispose of the CIA, dust our hands off and say sayonara etc. Back in the 80's I saw a guesstimate of $30 bill annually for CIA which is a secret part of the Pentagon budget. That was back in the day of Allende and Noriega and that sort of shenanigans. Since, there has been the unwarned collapse of the Soviet Union which the CIA knew was coming since the 50's - but no U.S. president wanted to hear because the USSR allowed them to look "tough" and "commander in chiefie". Then 9/11 which they warned Bush 50+ times about and which he ignored - perhaps to give him the "Pearl Harbor" he wanted for his war in Iraq (in Ron Suskind's book about Bush's first Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neil, he tells how at Bush's FIRST cabinet meeting in Feb. 2001 he greeted the assmebled cabinet with maps of Iraq and commanded them to find reasons to attack.).

In my opinion the $100 bill we spend on intel is not just a tragic waste - it encourages our leaders to do a bunch of "naughty stuff" they ought not to do.

Ear marks? Give me a break. Over and over you hear politicians speak of the evils of ear marks, but it recently occured to me that this is the only way we get roads and bridges and schools and stuff that people need. And how much are we talking here? $25 billion - $50 billion a year? Compared to the $175 billion one month budget deficit for who knows what?
Peanuts.


Interest on the debt? Yes, this is a biggie. Go to www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm and you'll see a listing of our interest payments on the debt going back to 1988 and a monthly accounting for the current fiscal year. These are monster movie scary numbers. Elsewhere on the treasury site you can find the debt figure. I know it was under $5 trillion when Cllinton left office; by the time Bush leaves it will be nearly $10 trillion. The one big positive out of the Clinton years was the fact that he got spending under control - I don't agree with all the ways he did it, but now Bush has blown all that progress away and the growth in this number as the economy goes down (and takes tax revenue with it) may well end the Federal Government as we know it. I'm betting Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have an idea...

Better roads & bridges? No (see above).