I’m not usually the most partisan member of the Virginia blogosphere, but the guys over at Raising Kaine made a pretty absurd attempt today to turn the Minneapolis bridge tragedy into a political issue:
[T]his year the Democratic Minnesotan legislature passed a $4.18 billion transportation package including major money for maintenance, but Pawlenty vetoed it because he had taken a no-new-taxes pledge, saying “…the advocates overreached… if they came in with a more reasonable plan, maybe the results would have been different,” meaning the tax increases proposed in both the first and second versions were not acceptable. The more parsimonious bill which finally passed, tailored to meet Pawlenty’s objections, was $3.8 billion for “status quo” on transportation, including $347.8 million for infrastructure support, and no real increases in funding across the board. Given the legislative war recently concluded in Virginia over exactly this sort of transportation funding, it is instructive to read documentation on Minnesota’s experience.
Unfortunately, the logic of the RK bloggers position is slightly undercut by the fact that Minnesota already has the tenth highest tax rate per capita of any state in the country
Since we haven’t received reports of bridges collapsing in states ranked 11-50 in taxation rates, the assertion that failing to increase taxes is the cause of this tragedy, especially when we don’t even know what caused it yet, is just absurd.
