We Need Grown-Up, not Childish Reaction to Bridge Collapse.
Bridge collapses into a river, killing several, traumatizing many. The reaction of some? Blame the no-new-taxes pledge.

Childish? Yes, especially when put into rhyme by one resident who used a child's song in a letter-to-the-editor, published in one of the metropolitan area's major newspapers. Ah, the wisdom of children!

Children want what they want when they want it, which is "everything" and "now."

People who carp about the Iraq war, foreign aid, corporate welfare (I'm against two of the three, for whatever it's worth) engage in a game of "Imagine," which is also the title of one of the most childish pop songs of all time.

Imagine a world without tax cuts, by golly, nothing would ever go wrong. There would be no tax collapse.

Sure. As if. Raise taxes in the name of fixing bridges, and how much of that money will actually go towards fixing bridges?

Less than 100 percent. It will get sucked into pet causes of various sorts, none of which have anything to do with bridges. The problem isn't a lack of government revenue. How about a new slogan? "It's the priorities, stupid!"

Raise taxes to fix a problem? As if. Give government all the money it says that it needs, and no harm will ever assail us.

Right.

Sorry. The lesson of the bridge is not that tax cuts are bad, or even that ever increasing tax rates are bad.

It's that the political process gives us fun social experiments and "let's make the world a better place" dreaming, which take the attention off the basics.

And even if government focused exclusively on the basics, there would still be tragedies dues to randomness, bad luck, whatever. That's because we've forgotten two very important words.

Stuff happens. (permalink)