The editorial writers at the Daily Press are sputtering mad about their precious tax increases going down to defeat:
You can talk about land use. You can talk about innovation. You can talk about privatization, creativity and reform. But at the end of the day, road improvements require money. Hard money. Unambiguous legal tender. Cash.
I’ve been tracking the DP transportation editorials for a long time and this is the first time I’ve seen the Peninsula pundits acknowledge that there were alternatives to raising taxes. Land use… Innovation… Privatization… Creativity… Reform… Those words have not been part of the pundits’ vocabulary throughout this debate.
It’s pretty clear that the DP scribblers don’t give much weight to those ideas, but at least they’ve been bludgeoned into conceding that those “anti-tax ideologues” in the House Republican caucus actually have ideas. No longer is it possible to portray the critics of Business As Usual — which include, by the way, the conservationist/ environmentalist wing of the Democratic Party — as drooling idiots bereft of thought.
That’s progress of a sort. Call me a dreamer, but I can always hope: Maybe the next step will be for the DP to engage those ideas rather than dismiss them out of hand, and to explain why they are not sufficient to address Virginia’s transportation challenges.
