God has smiled on me:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pdf/201008/20100802report-summertimeblues.pdf
I start a new blog on a Sunday, and by the proceeding Tuesday, the Senate shines a national spotlight on one of my favorite causes. It seems that Pittsburgh's star-crossed North Shore Connector project has outgrown our pleasant little hamlet and is now not only a civic embarassment but a national one. Today, Tom Coburn and John McCain published "Summertime Blues," a report highlighting the most pathetic municipal boondoggles to receive money in the name of stimulus. On a list of 100 of the most wasteful, useless examples government graft and grade-school Keynesianism, the North Shore Connecter was discussed third. It's unclear whether or not Coburn and McCain consider this the third worst stimulus project in the country, but they certainly gave it some enviable real estate. Hardly anyone's going to read about the project listed 87th. I sure didn't.
A moment ago I used the term "star-crossed" to describe the North Shore Connector; I was only being coy. Romeo and Juliet were star-crossed. A crack baby is star-crossed. This big, stupid hole was a farce to anyone who was paying attention. And that's not just hindsight: five years ago, I recall passing emails back-and-forth with some friends of mine, probably nursing a hangover at the time, poking fun at what an aimless investment this was. Maybe me and my battle-tempered liver should have been County Commisioner instead of Dan Onorato.
At the time, I attributed the enthusiasm for the project to envy; it seemed that we wanted a quixotic government endeavor just like Boston and the other big cities. (I may have had a point, too, because when Ravenstahl the Boy King became Mayor, he chose to audit Boston's city government instead of, say, Charlotte or Nashville or Houston or some other city that's actually done well over the past decade.) The past few years have demonstrated, though, that the pathology runs much deeper--and much wider--than that.
The Infrastructure Insanity pervades almost every corner of the Democratic constituency, and regrettably, it has more traction in the Republican Party than it would appear now, at the crest of the Tea Party Era. The truth is, people love shiny new toys. They want to believe in shiny new toys. Costs get rounded down, benefits get rounded up (or sometimes conjured out of Keynesian alchemy), and pretty soon we're digging a hole under a river (and under three four-land bridges, no less) to connect one underoccupied area of the city to another.
As McCain and Coburn put it, this was all to shuffle people to the new casine and to the sports stadiums. From this perspective, the inanity of stimulus spending appears in stark relief. Downtown, there were no people; at PNC Park, there was no product; and somehow spending $500 million dollars to sew the two failed private enterprises together would cure both ailments. And, if you're not already aware, the Steelers haven't had a problem filling their seats since Richard Nixon was considered electable.
What "Summertime Blues" illustrates, and the "tragic mistake" of the North Shore Connector reinforces, is that the lure of the shiny new toys is all the more irresistible when we're splitting the bill with no one in particular.
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