Creigh Deeds Offers a Real Transportation Plan for Virginia

The reality is that Virginia's transportation infrastructure is crumbling and not keeping up with the needs of both residents and businesses that are currently located in or which would otherwise consider relocating to Virginia. Why? Because of the never ending no new tax mantra of Bob McDonnell and his cohorts in the Virginia GOP who somehow think roads and other infrastructure needs magically fund themselves out of thin air. The grid lock in Northern Virginia is horrific - last December it took us an hour to go five miles on I-95 into Washington, D.C.and that was without any accidents. The situation in Tidewater while not as severe is worsening steadily even with the down turn in new home construction. In an op-ed piece yesterday in the Washington Post Creigh Deeds leveled with Virginians as to the magnitude of the problem which is largely the result of 20 years of GOP obstruction of any new transportation plan and associated funding. The Washington Post today ran an editorial lauding Deeds' candor and comparing it to Bob McDonnell's smoke and mirrors faux plan for addressing the states terrible transportation needs. Obviously, the last 20 years of GOP obstruction have created the problem, so why would anyone with a shred of sanity expect more of the same under McDonnell to yield a different result. Here are some editorial highlights:

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R.CREIGH DEEDS, the Democrat running for governor in Virginia, has now unequivocally committed himself to support higher taxes to rescue the state's sclerotic road system. His stance is nothing more or less than common sense: Virginia needs tens of billions of dollars in new revenue for roads, and it will not materialize without asking taxpayers -- the same taxpayers who rightly groan about traffic -- to foot a good part of the bill. Still, by articulating that position in plain English on the opposite page Wednesday, Mr. Deeds showed political guts, which is more than one can say for the smoke-and-mirrors, wing-and-a-prayer approach to transportation endorsed by his opponent, Republican nominee Robert F. McDonnell.

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True to form, Virginia Republicans are betting that an easily misled electorate will be too shortsighted to notice that the state has completely run out of road-building funds. In this fiscal year, Richmond will spend scarcely $1 million to build and improve roads in all of Northern Virginia -- a laughable sum when measured against the billions needed. Two years from now, state spending on new roads in Northern Virginia is projected to be precisely zero. Mr. Deeds doesn't want to hit Virginians in the middle of a recession; he doesn't want to act without bipartisan consensus; but he wants to act.

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Over the next 20 years, Virginia will need to raise an extra $100 billion -- minimum -- if it is to maintain and expand a transportation network that will meet the state's growth. The commonwealth is business-friendly; it already runs a relatively tight ship, as repeated ratings and studies have shown. Further rounds of streamlining, consolidation and efficiencies will not yield major new savings, and hoping that a new economic boom will unclog the state's roads is wishful thinking.

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Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks that Virginia can get traffic moving or even slow the deterioration of its road system without fresh revenue -- and yes, a tax increase -- is living in an alternate reality. By his honesty, Mr. Deeds has now prepared the way for a mandate, should he be elected, to address the state's most critical problem.

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Sadly, Bob McDonnell like most of the Christianists and deranged GOP base ARE living in an alternate reality. One where science and objective facts do not matter and where religious extremism and government by slogans are the norm. Virginia does NOT need Bob McDonnell's reality free world view.

Time to Reboot America

I book marked Tom Friedman's latest column in the New York Times a fee days ago because it looks at what I believe should be among the highest priorities of the Obama administration - in addition to health care insurance reforms - because it will help on both the employment front and, I believe, in bolstering confidence again in the country/economy. What is it? A public works effort to rebuild are aging and dilapidated national infrastructure. Compared to other nations, much of our public works infrastructure is old, out dated and falling apart. Moreover, as in the Great Depression a well thought out and disciplined public works campaign would provide jobs and much needed improvements. Here are some highlights from Friedman's column:

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I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America. It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop. Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.

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The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span. All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?

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My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

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{o]ur present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover.

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[W]e must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants.

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America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.