Levy: Nation can do better than tearing down ‘racist’ roads

Levy: Nation can do better than tearing down ‘racist’ roads

07/28/2022

By: Steve Levy

LIBN: https://libn.com/2022/07/28/levy-nation-can-do-better-than-tearing-down-racist-roads/

In the July 8th edition of Long Island Business News, an article was featured entitled: “Buttigieg launches $1 billion pilot to build racial equity in roads.” The priorities and policies enunciated in this article, featuring Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, exemplify why we as a nation may soon lose our title as the world’s dominant power to China.

Think about it. With all the enormous problems facing our nation – from the highest inflation in 40 years to the loss of our energy independence to the open border we purposely enabled (allowing millions of illegal aliens each year to enter our country) – the biggest priority on the mind of Buttigieg is to spend $1 billion to tear down roads that Buttigieg and his crazy allies have deemed to be “racist.”

Comedian Bill Maher, of HBO’s Real Time, a long-time liberal Democrat who relishes bashing Republicans, has recently reversed course and is lashing out against the lunacy of the far-left woke crowd, of which Buttigieg is a charter member.

In one of Maher’s more brilliant monologues, he noted that while China is building a massive number of new roads and bridges throughout its borders and around the world, we, in America, can’t build new stuff because we’re stuck spending all of our time debating who the bridge should be named after.

There you have it. In an era when China is building dynamic new infrastructure, we tear down perfectly good roads and start all over so a would-be presidential candidate can bolster his bonafides with a demographic group with whom he has struggled in the past as a former mayor of the small city of South Bend in Indiana.

President Obama once wisely conceded there is no such thing as a shovel-ready road in our nation. That’s because the myriad environmental and bureaucratic regulations make expedited building almost impossible.

Take for instance the fact that while the Empire State building was built in a mere 13 months, it took New York City an astounding 13 years to rebuild the World Trade Center.

Comedian Maher had an earlier monologue where he called upon Congress to create a new program analogous to the cross-country interstate highway program that was successfully implemented in the Eisenhower administration. Good luck with that one.

Ironically, it is the extremist environmental positions demanded by Maher and his green friends that put us in this position. How rich that years later he would lament the fact that it has taken him three years to get a permit approved just to install solar panels on his home.

And now we have a Transportation Department under the tutelage of Buttigieg promulgating ridiculous policy as follows:

“The Transportation Department has aimed to help communities that feel racially harmed by highway expansions, with the federal highway administration last year taking a rare step to pause a proposed $9 billion widening project in Houston, partly over civil rights concerns.”

“The Transportation Department has previously estimated it could help as many as 20 US communities under the new program to remove portions of interstates and redesign streets by tapping into other transportation funds”

With all the urgent needs we face in this nation, this is the claptrap our leaders are focused on? Follow this woke nonsense and you will be led into a pit of poverty, stagnation and waste. We can do better.

Steve Levy is president of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.”