WisDOT, allies holding motorists, communities as tax-and-spend hostages

You have to see through the highway expansion game, people. 

First the road-builders' trade association comes in with its doomsday list of project delays, and now WisDOT expands the list to 225?

'What do we do now?' Chicken Little says. 'How do we rescue ourselves from the nightmare? Which taxes do we raise, or which programs do we cut to back-fill the budgeted shortfall we just approved? How do we make the road-builders feel wanted?'

And where were all these world-ending numbers during the budget, when it was accountability time?

And now Walker wants fresh borrowing - - while he played a key role in kicking off $6.5 billion in SE WI 'free'way' expansion and rebuilding when there was no financial plan on the table or approved to fund it!

You give WisDOT more money, and it will keep letting contracts and over-building an already over-built system when fewer millenials and seniors will be driving and the transit they prefer is being ignored.

And there will be more demands for more road-building money in the future, for more lanes, more repairs, more patrolling, more plowing.

How do you think I-43 from Milwaukee to Sheboygan County is going to be paid for? Or I-43 SW across all of Walworth County. And I-94 past Miller Park, then all the way from the Zoo Interchange across Waukesha County to Jefferson County.

By which time the Marquette Interchange will need major repairs, or more lanes and ramps, etc.

Do some serious budgeting. Don't grab for the new credit card, the fresh line of credit on top of a second mortgage when you can't pay for the first on the house that was too big in the first place.

Don't play the game.

But if you do, Mr. and Ms. Legislator, make the tax-and-spend big-borrowers own all the tax-increase politics and labels and 'credit' if the decision at the Capitol is to give the government-roadbuilder complex more money of our money.