Thursday, September 15, 2011

Louisville Bridge Is Falling Down, Part 3

Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth from here in Kentucky went on Rachel Maddow this week to talk about our Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul say we can't afford infrastructure in America, and really that the people of McConnell's hometown can just sacrifice to give the "job creators" more tax cuts.



YARMUTH: What he needs to do is he needs come back to the district, he needs to stand there and talk to the people who are waiting in line and say, ‘You know, we don’t need to be investing in infrastructure, we can’t afford it right now. And ask them to make the sacrifice.’ He’s not willing to do that. Again, to portray what the president has said as just another political act defies reality. He’s staring in the face of something that is of enormous consequence to hundreds of thousands of his constituents. … This affects everybody. Mitch needs to take a leadership role in the Senate to help get this kind of investment adopted by Congress. If he doesn’t step forward, I don’t know how we can get it done. But he needs to. These are his people.

Yep, and I'm one of them, a registered, likely voter in Kentucky, and I want to see these bridges fixed before they have to be shut down for months.

Industrial trucking companies have estimated the closure is costing them as much as $4,400 a day, while local companies have had to accommodate employees whose commute times have increased by more than an hour in some instances. Extra costs and potential drops in productivity will have an untold negative impact on the local economy. Kentucky and Indiana, meanwhile, may pay for repairs by diverting funds from other infrastructure projects, including a new Ohio River bridge.

You see, this bridge closure is costing taxpayers and businesses far more than just fixing the bridge in the first place.  But we can't afford to fix the bridges because that's too expensive?

Republicans just think you're stupid.

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