When seeking stimulus money, Barack Obama railed about how badly broken the nations infrastructure had become after years of pre-Obama neglect. I live in the Northeast, the oldest and least modernized portion of the country. If there are crumbling schools and pot-holed highways anywhere I should be able to find them here. But the state highways are good, the Interstates are mostly excellent. In the city where I live the high school building is fine although not luxurious. The towns on either side of us have million dollar ball fields and multi-million dollar gymnasiums. Room for improvement? Always. Decaying and crumbling? Not at all.
But Obama got his money and a good bit of it was spent on infrastructure. There is a very nice 40 or 50 mile parkway here. Work started on a stretch of it, perhaps 8 miles long, well before any signs went up. Those of us among the uninformed who drive that stretch of the parkway regularly were puzzled; what were they planning to do on this perfectly good section of the road. We soon found out.
Biden came, stood on the road and made a speech. “America is being revitalized and we are starting here.” Signs were posted, heavy equipment came in, barricades went up narrowing the road, trees came down and dirt was moved. A few millions of dollars later the equipment will be gone, the barricades will be removed, the road will be the same and the nice landscape that was on both sides will be a little nicer.
It’s not just us citizens who are losing our freedoms, cities and states are losing theirs as well. The Federal Highway Commission is requiring the City of New York to spend the city’s own money to replace signs that read like “PERRY AV” with signs that read like “Perry AV”.
Every street sign in the city must be replaced at an estimated cost to the city of $27.5M. Why? The Fed says the old ones are less safe. “Drivers can read Perry quicker than they can read PERRY so their eyes will return quicker to the road”. Hard to believe? Here’s a link to the story.
This sort of thing is much more than utter stupidity and waste, or perhaps a return to a sign maker for his campaign contribution. It’s the tyranny of central planning.
RANDOM THOTS 