Keeping Mitt's mitts off your money
Despite having no idea how much the Big Dig repairs will cost yet, Mass. Governor Mitt Romney is already plotting ways to reach into your pocket to pay for it.
According to the Boston Globe (The Monitor didn't seem to have this quote online):
"I'd be embarrassed if I didn't always ask for federal money whenever I got the chance," Romney quipped, saying he had asked for help in paying for a comprehensive safety review of the Big Dig, for which the state has allocated $20 million.
So let's see if I got this fiasco straight:
Massachusetts plans a huge undertaking: put major tunnels under the city of Boston. Projected cost: $2.6 billion (with a B) with a seven year timetable. Despite a Presidential veto, it is passed and the work begins. Everyone lines up to get their share of the wealth, Democrat and Republican alike, from big to small. Kerry? Weld? Everyone got some.
Cost overruns pile up, time drags on and now, we're at nearly 15 years and the price is now $14.6 billion (with a B) including clear evidence (during a federal audit) of concealing $1.4 billion (yes, another B) in cost overruns. That's right, it's not just later and more expensive... but they tried to hide that fact, like covering the elephant in the middle of the room with a sheet.
Finally, now that an innocent woman is dead, Mitt can try and step up to look like a hero, his big (with a B) mitts are out, palm up, expecting not just his own constituents, but everyone else in the country, to pay to check out just what the problems really are, and then fix it all.
If Government can't even safely build what at the end of the day should have just been a "big tunnel" (with a B), despite twice the time expected and 6 times the estimated cost, how can we trust them to do anything more critical and time sensitive? Do you want to put your (mandatory)(universal) healthcare into Mitt's trust? How about your life savings or your future retirement? How about your homeland security or police protection?
To be fair, Mitt himself isn't the problem here, it's that we've created a system where all the politicians have their hands out, palm up, and they expect you to dig deep, and dig often. That's the 'big dig' (with a B) nobody wants to talk about most of the time.
Is this not the height of a welfare system for the states? When a duly elected Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, asks for the Federal hand-out to help his state fix their problems, this is just as bad as Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans blaming the Federal Government for the many ill which have plagued New Orleans post-Katrina.
The founders of our country NEVER intended our states to be reliant on our Federal Governement, instead, looking for our states to be self-governing, self-reliant entities, bonded together by our federation with other states.
Everyone who has lived within a 100-mi. radius of Boston has known what a fiasco the Big Dig was from the get-go. From the point of the contractor, it's easy to generate cost over-runs, disguise them, and replace with a cheaper product.
The Solution? I'm not sure I know of one that wouldn't create more of a bureaucracy, which is what is NOT needed. Maybe just running the state and it's agencies like a business, accountable to the people, would be a start.