What's the value of a road?

Take it from someone who spent a childhood gagging on gravel dust out in rural Iowa, paved roads are a wonderful thing.  Thus, reading about how cash-strapped local governments are literally tearing up their roads, grinding them into gravel, almost made me cry. 

Roads are an essential mark of progress, of civilization.  They also bring tangible, practical benefits--there's a reason the Romans built roads everywhere they went.  But in America?  We're tearing up our roads, and, worse, we are refusing to pay the taxes needed to maintain them.

"I'd rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill," said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman's Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

That's great, Mr. Baumann.  Nevermind that gravel roads may be "costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed."

A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."

Maybe somewhere I can understand being unwilling to pay higher taxes for health care or, hell, schools, but infrastructure?  Roads?  We're no longer civic minded enough to penny-pinch for roads.  I think Digby puts it best:

This is a sign of a culture in deep decline...This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I'm guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won't convince them.

If a twenty-six year old law student weeping will convince anyone, I'll do it.