A good example is this story he told a Des Moines, Iowa paper when asked how he could better work to foster bipartisanship in a second term. He spoke about his hopes to craft a "grand bargain" on the deficit and to tackle immigration reform as examples where he thought progress could be made to fix Washington. Of course, there is nothing in President Obama's record of the past four years to suggest he is capable of solving any problems, especially when he has to work across the political aisle.
He also mentioned infrastructure spending as an area where he thought that bridges could be built with the Republicans...literally.
My hope is, is that there’s a recognition that now is a great time to make infrastructure improvements all across the country. And we can pull up some of the money that we know we’re going to be spending over the next decade to put people back to work right now at a time when contractors are dying for work and interest rates are really low.
And, again, that’s something that even John Boehner — John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, they’ve got a bridge linking Cincinnati and Kentucky, and the bridge is so broken down that folks are having to drive an hour and a half of extra commuting just to get across the Ohio River. There’s no reason why we can’t work on things like that and put people back to work.
Living in Cincinnati, I know something about this bridge. It is the Brent Spence Bridge and it connects Ohio and Kentucky on Interstate 75 just south of downtown Cincinnati. If you have ever flown into Cincinnati you take this bridge on your trip to downtown from the airport which is in Northern Kentucky.
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| Brent Spence Bridge Photo Credit: Ohio Department of Transportation |
First of all, it is not broken down. It is used quite heavily. Approximately 150,000 vehicles traverse the bridge daily. It was originally designed for about 80,000 vehicles per day so congestion can be a problem. It is antiquated and tight. However, I have heard no one say that it is falling apart. There is no one who avoids the bridge and is driving an extra hour and a half of extra commuting to avoid the bridge because it is "broken down". Further, I don't know anyone who is driving that far out of their way to even avoid the occasional congestion leading to the bridge.
I think there is a bigger story here when you take a closer look at this bridge story. First, this is not the first time the President has tried to use this bridge as a political prop. He came to Cincinnati in September, 2011 when he was trying to gain support for an infrastructure "stimulus" program (how many of those has he tried to sell?) and held his press event with the bridge as the backdrop for the tv cameras. This is how Andrew Malcolm wrote about that visit in the Los Angeles Times.
You know all those rusting bridges that President Obama wants to spend billions more dollars repairing to allegedly stimulate the economy?
He's headed out to one today which he's described as a "bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that's on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America." It is on a busy trucking route, spanning the Ohio River between Covington, Ky., and Cincinnati.
It's the Brent Spence Bridge. It doesn't really need repairs. It's got decades of good life left in its steel spans. It's just overloaded. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and trucks a day, which seemed like a lot back during construction in the Nixon era.
Today, the bridge sort of handles more than 150,000 vehicles a day with frequent jam-ups.
So, plans are not to repair or replace the Brent Spence Bridge. But to build another bridge nearby to ease the loads.
But here's the problem, as John Merline graphically notes here, that could screw up all those envisioned photo op shots of the Democrat and the traffic:
The president's jobs bill is designed for "immediate" highway spending.
And the new $2.3 billion Cincy bridge is not scheduled to even start construction for probably four years, long after Republicans have scheduled the Obama presidency for completion.
And without delays, it wouldn't be finished until 2022, when no one will be counting Obama's rounds of golf.
The second part of this story is the estimated cost of the new bridge. This article cites $2.3 billion for the new span but I have seen projections that it might actually cost $3 billion by the time it is finished.
Do you have any idea how much the current Brent Spence bridge cost when it first went into service in 1963?
$10 million!
How does a bridge that cost $10 million fifty years ago come to cost $2.5 billion today? That is a 250,000% increase. Have steel and concrete costs increased that much? How about labor costs? It is not even close.
Adjusting merely for the consumer price index that $10 million bridge in 1963 would cost $75 million today. That is a long way from $2.5 billion. Where are all the extra costs coming from?
A big part of the reason is clearly related to the enormous amount of regulations that any major infrastructure or capital project must adhere to today compared to 1963. Environmental impact studies, urban impact studies, minority hiring regulations, wage and hour rules, OSHA regulations and many more. Many of these government regulations are important and well meaning. However, we need to fully understand the burden of these costs on our economy. The benefits as well as the costs. President Obama has been unwilling to consider the red tape. In fact, a recent study estimated that the cost of added regulations under President Obama to be $488 billion. That could pay for a lot of bridges.
The amount of time to fill out the additional federal paperwork just since President Obama took office is an increase of 1.5 billion hours according to the same study. Assuming a 2,000 hour work week year, it would take 771,999 full-time workers simply to deal with the red tape. That much labor time could build 220 Empire State Buildings.
Looking at these numbers has anyone stopped to think about the stimulus potential to our economy if just a fraction of government regulations were taken off of our backs? It certainly does not appear that the President has stopped to think about it.
Let me sum it up this way. There is no way anyone should be buying a bridge from Barack Obama. He is no where close to building one in Cincinnati. He also never got close to building any type of bipartisan bridge in Washington over the last four years. I am not buying what he is selling. If you are thinking about taking another plunge with him...please consider your vote very carefully...he may take us all down with him.
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| Credit: CNN |
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