Tax-cut death toll

The bridge-collapse tragedy is a teachable moment: This is your government on conservatism.

This year two Democratic Minnesotan legislatures passed a $4.18 billion transportation package. Minnesota's Republican governor vetoed it because he had taken a no-new-taxes pledge, Grover Norquist-style. That's just what conservative politicians do.

The original bill would have put over $8 billion toward highways, city, and county roads, and transit over the next decade. The bill he let passed spent much less.

Now four people are dead, and counting.

"Much more needs to be done, but the advocates overreached," Pawlenty said concerning his veto. "I told leaders that if they came in with a more reasonable plan, maybe the results would have been different."

Yes, maybe they would have been different indeed.

[UPDATE: There should be a robust debate about just what the chain of causality was for this tragedy, and how much of the blame should be apportioned to Tim Pawlenty's anti-tax obsession and the conservative ant-tax obsession generally. I'm at the Yearly Kos conference just now and won't have much time to render the terms of the debate in detail. This post, however, does so admirably—while still giving a sense of the big picture. I recommend it.]