City poised to sell land for new bridge

[kraig]

Huh? Whhhat? There's not likely any objective discussion with Bshea about this. Are you one of those, 'The government is all bad' guys, citing your negative military experiences as a rationale to indict the government for every perceived injustice, excluding them from doing anything? Ronald Reagan, George Bushkin and their ilk, implicated the government in every failure known to man, purposely running up HUGE deficits, so they could "drown it in a bathtub", to paraphrase their acolyte, Grover Nordquist. Geez, how'd the Interstate get built? Who was behind the railroads? I guess it was private corporations who put a man on the moon. A private/public partnership might be the best case scenario. Governments could engage the private sector to build, and possibly run, a bridge with proper oversight. That might be ideal. The problem with that scenario is the private sector would have the government conceive of something, engage a private corporation to build and run it, with cost plus contracts and no oversight. Executives would make huge bonuses and the workers and maintenance would suffer. After it was depreciated for years, the corporation would be rid of it. It'd fall back in to the hands of taxpayers, to be rebuilt under another non-compete, cost plus, no oversight, contract. All the while they'd lobby for tax breaks and subsidies. The whiz kids of Wall Street and private, free enterprise, would surely do much better than government. Look around you, I'm sure you see plenty of evidence of the wonders of Wall Street. Whatever happens, I don't want King Manny and another ruthless corporation running another business around here. Certainly not a monopoly.

When I said "objectively", I was referring to the fact that the government should not be in the business with competing against private businesses, that would be a lose-lose scenario all the way around. As far as me being one of those "the government is all bad guy's" that's not the case either. If you notice I'm encouraging that the government do more in the way of servicing all of the state bridges/overpasses, which I think is reasonable.

If the question was put on the ballot to voters in michigan as to which they would prefer, do you think it would be:

A. Spend the state resources on building a bridge that connects the U.S. to Canada two miles from the existing bridge.

or

B. Spend the state resources on fixing the hundreds of bridges/overpasses that have been determined to be in the same condition as the bridges that collapsed in Minnesota and Atlanta.

Personally, I think most people would go with answer B. Remember, there had been numerous reports for years that something needed to be done with the Levees in New Orleans, those reports were viewed as frivolous until the Levees broke. We have been lucky so far, but sooner or later everyone's luck runs out.

By the way, the Belle Isle Bridge is one those bridges that is in dire need of repair. Think about how many times traffic comes to a standstill on that bridge going both ways. That's a tragedy waiting to happen. If one your loved ones died would you want to hear the state say that their priority was building a public bridge that would compete with a private one?