Lean Left

The Wall Street Journal reports, without a hint of irony or embarrassment, that many states and counties around the country are letting their paved roads turn back into dirt or gravel roads to avoid the taxes required to pay for maintaining the asphalt.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.

But higher taxes for road maintenance are equally unpopular. In June, Stutsman County residents rejected a measure that would have generated more money for roads by increasing property and sales taxes.

“I’d rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill,” said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman’s Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

Part of the problem is that asphalt costs have gone up with the price of oil – meaning the “Back to the Stone Age” trend, as one expert called it, is the result both of low-tax fervor and our petroleum dependency.

Digby hits it right on the head:

If [the "let my kids drive on dirt"] guy wasn’t brainwashed, he’d be talking about how the wealthy should be pitching for these roads, but Rush tells him that taxes are evil, even for millionaires, and he believes it so fervently that he’d rather go back to a primitive state than challenge that orthodoxy. This is a sign of a culture in deep decline.

. . . This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.

One of the premier betterment projects in the history of the United States – and a major contributor to the productivity boom that made mindless consumerism so rewarding from the 50s onward – is literally being allowed to crumble to dust by people who just hate the idea of government services so much they will deliberately choose squalor over the most basic public improvements if it would mean they actually have to pay taxes to make their own lives better. It would be tempting to just let them do it, but of course it’s a lot of other people’s lives – particularly the poorest and those who most need basic infrastructure – that they’re also consigning to pre-war backwardism.

The capper, of course, is that the anti-taxers still want all the benefits of government services – they just don’t want a government, or to take any part in making it work:

Judy Graves of Ypsilanti, N.D., voted against the measure to raise taxes for roads. But she says she and others nonetheless wrote to Gov. John Hoeven and asked him to stop Old 10 from being ground up because it still carries traffic to a Cargill Inc. malting plant. She says the county has mismanaged its finances and badly neglected roads.

She voted against paying for roads in her community, and now thinks some other division of government should pay for them because her local government neglected them after she voted not to pay for them. Naturally, she voted against the taxes because the government “mismanaged” its money – presumably by paying for frivolous things like civic improvements to support the local employment and tax base – so the government should now spend other people’s money to make civic improvements for her community.

The WSJ, of course, takes no responsibility for the anti-tax cultism they have preached for decades, and the consequences of which they now report with sterile indifference.