Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow and others on the left have been spouting the pro-tax talking point that America’s roads are in a state of ruin.
But is it true or is it just another example of left-wing Chicken Littlism?
Well, I ran across a Slate article by Jack Shafer titled Paved and Confused: What Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow and the Press Corps don’t Understand about Gravel Roads and he thinks these folks is nuts:
USA Today was among the first to sound the alarm that the nation’s paved roads were ripped up and turned to gravel in a Feb. 4 piece headlined “Tight Times Put Gravel on the Road.”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek got its piece of the story in April with “In North Dakota, a Rebirth of Gravel Roads,” and the Wall Street Journal contributed “Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement” on July 17.
Although none of these stories exaggerated the paved-to-gravel devolution of some of America’s back roads, that’s not the way two of the country’s top media liberals read them. The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, obviously riffing off the Journal coverage, labeled the downgrading of U.S. roads as a metaphorical harbinger of the nation’s decline in his Aug. 8 column.
“America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere,” wrote Krugman.
The next night, Rachel Maddow echoed Krugman on her MSNBC show, specifically citing the Journal story, calling gravelization a “wacky Luddite solution.”
“We are literally unpaving the roads,” Maddow exclaimed.
But the long-term road trend—unacknowledged in the stories—is that local, state, and federal governments have been on a paving binge for the last 50 years. According to federal government statistics, the country had 1.23 million miles of paved road and 2.31 million miles of unpaved road in 1960. By 2008, that ratio had flipped—2.73 million miles of paved road versus 1.32 million miles of unpaved. In other words, in a half century the infrastructure gained 1.5 million miles of paved road.
In only two reporting periods between 1960 and 2008 did the number of U.S. paved miles decline. In 1993, they dropped 25,000 from the previous year, and in 2004, they fell by 34,000. This unpaving failed to disturb pundits back then—or, I should say, I can’t find any pundits bemoaning the loss of paved road back then in Nexis.When a road gets unpaved, there’s usually a good reason for it. The Wall Street Journal waits until the final paragraphs of its story to explain that Highway 10—the North Dakota road that’s being unpaved and is the peg for its article—was made redundant in the 1950s by the construction of Interstate 94, which parallels it. Traffic on Highway 10 proceeded to fall and fall until the thoroughfare “became a lazy back country road dotted with abandoned farmsteads,” the Journal reports
And Krugman has the audacity to accuse the right of playing on people’s fears?¹
Honesty in the tax debate my ass!
Footnotes:
¹ Listen to what Krugman (“he’s an honorable man, they are all honorable men”) said about Republicans who opposed Obamacare:
Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.
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