By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
Reading a campaign speech in Milwaukee this week, Joe Biden boasted of a plan to spend some $36 million on a stretch of 6th Street, just west of downtown Milwaukee. His speechwriter had him listing such federally funded benefits as bike lanes, newly planted trees, and bus lanes to make 6th Street a prettier place to be.
And sure, it might at that. Trees are always lovely for pedestrians, though they can obstruct the view of pedestrians, drivers, and bicyclists alike.
And bicycles and buses are always generically popular, even though in Milwaukee they each tend to have about the same occupancy. A long running joke in Milwaukee is that they started tinting the windows of their buses years ago, so that you couldn’t look inside them and see how empty they usually are.
Now that the campaign cycle is fully engaged, Joe Biden is traveling throughout the country, reading speeches like this in big cities and small ones, offering the same goodies to everybody.
There are just three problems with this approach.
1. When government plans which projects to develop, it rarely chooses as well as the private sector would. They choose things with politics in mind, no matter whether the expenditures will help or not. Encouraging bicycles in a busy downtown is dangerous. Encouraging buses in Milwaukee has been a losing bet for generations. And planting rows of trees on the same streets – when you’re already adding bike lanes and bus lanes – just means compounding the danger. These central planners aren’t thinking through any of these ideas; they’re just checking off fields in a budgetary game of Mad Libs.
2. Ask any resident of Milwaukee – or, heck, any resident of any American city today – and they won’t list bike lanes, bus routes, or a lack of greenery among their top twenty problems. Milwaukee and all the rest of our troubled American cities are suffering from record levels of crime caused by an avalanche of repeat offenders who are constantly being set free. They are suffering from a wave of illegal aliens, overwhelming the social safety net, housing stock, public schools, and the healthcare system, even competing with low-income American citizens for entry level jobs. These are the areas where our cities desperately need relief, and the Biden-Harris regime is making these problems infinitely worse on a daily basis, not better.
3. And most important for at least some of us in flyover country, none of this is any of the federal government’s business in the first place. The Constitution of the United States clearly lists the roles of the federal government, from coining money to defending our shores, from appointing ambassadors to standardizing our weights and measures. It doesn’t give Washington DC the power to spend tax dollars on tree-lined boulevards, bike lanes and commuter bus routes in our neighborhoods. That’s the job of the states, counties, and cities, not the federal government. All these plans are frankly illegal, if we read the Constitution that Joe Biden and his appointees dishonorably swore an oath to obey.
This story was almost a throwaway line, in fact, not expected to be controversial, repeated in dozens of cities on dozens of campaign stops. Swap out one street name for another, one city name for another; thank this mayor or that county executive. It’s all the same dog and pony show, week after week, election after election. The stump speech as thoughtless boilerplate.
It’s all designed to distract the voters from the real problems that the federal government is either intentionally disregarding or, often, downright exacerbating.
And its high time the electorate stopped putting up with it, and started to shout back to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and all their goodies-dispensing cronies, “That’s none of your business!” and even more important, “Do your job, for once in your life!”
For we do indeed need the government in Washington, D.C. to change course, to start obeying the Constitution, to stop spending us into bankruptcy court with costly frills. We need government to do its job: to secure our borders from illegal aliens, to lock up the robbers, rapists, drug dealers and killers, and to relax the stranglehold on industry that drives our jobs overseas.
But that won’t happen if this crowd holds the reins of power.
November can’t come soon enough.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his three volume political satires of the Biden-Harris regime, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” are available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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