Arkansas Blog

Yep, and in Arkansas large portions of it go to a dying part of the state in a futile effort to reverse an unstoppable trend. All those highways do is to make easier for the flow outward to other regions.

Okay, LR, keep yer friggin paws off "our" road money. We're going to need a four-lane with lots of lights and bells and whistles around our new electric power plant at McNab.

ARK. BLOG: Yep. They could build one of those highways on piers -- like they have through the Atchafalaya bottoms in Louisiana -- right through Emon Mahony's hunting club. What you think?

Our problem, Louie, is we don't have a John Paul Hammerschmidt to arm wrestle those highway people to get their attention.

Are we talking about money for the nation's INTERSTATE highway system?

A bunch of loops and belts that stay in one city, much less one state, can hardly be called INTERSTATE!

Notice the roads built all have the "I" designation which signifies interstate.

So logically the flyover land with open spaces would end up with more miles per inhabitant than a place where the population is densely stacked 30 or 100 stories high.

Don't think of it as the urban areas getting "less"; think of it as the rural areas getting "more". In all seriousness, as with virtually everything else, it's less cost efficient to deal with the sparsely populated rural areas of the country so they've traditionally been left behind in such sectors as utilities, economic development and health care, and more money needs to be pumped into them per capita to keep them from falling still further behind. And that's constitutional; we are all guaranteed rights, and if tax dollars are involved they are to used to give everybody in these United States comparable opportunity. Stick it in your ear, Cato; rural Arkansas and rural America are not "dying."

Northwest Arkansas doesn't need the money. Little Rock needs it because it isn't fair for Northwest Arkansas to say that they make more money for the state. Wal Mart is the devil. JB Hunt is racist. Tyson hurts the environment. All of those companies in Northwest Arkansas that do business globally are cheating hardworking Americans out of jobs. U of A should have more football games in Little Rock. It's not fair that most of their home games are in Fayetteville. They have too many Rethuglicans in the Northwest. What do they need so many great hospitals for? Why should they get the World Trade Center? How many shopping malls do they need up there? It just isn't fair.

If you're not first, you're last.

Don't be a dipshit, Ricky Bobby. Or have you been drinking y'alls chicken-shit flavored water? There is no reason we can't all get along. But since you started it, when was the last time you heard of someone in another state or country being sent to NWA for medical treatment (Joplin doesn't count)? Do you really think anyone else thinks of that as "The World Trade Center" but you? And you can have that nice new mall, thanks. Or maybe you missed all of our national rankings on how stable the LR real estate market is? And how diverse our economy is? Yeah, I didn't think so. Good luck on your real estate investments in Centerton.

I'm tired of subsidizing rural Arkansas with our tax dollars so they can turn around and complain about socialism, liberals and Obama. If they only received the taxes they pay, they wouldn't have highways at all.

Liberal: one who pays taxes that get redistributed to other people.
Conservative: one who receives tax money redistributed from liberals.
What is wrong with that picture?

>>Why should they get the World Trade Center?<<

Because "they" generate 75% of Ark's international trade, like it or not, save for Ark's largest export, rice, which has it's own international, gubbermint minded agency.

It's amazing to me that you can go out to eat in Ark and rarely find the state's largest crop being served unless you're eating Oriental-Asian. It's always some form of greasy potatoes, loaded with deep fryer fat, butter, cheese, greasy gravy, sour cream, etc.

More rice, more highways for NWA. Let the money follow the traffic.

Benton and Washington County now have the same or slightly more people
than Pulaski County (2000 census). We have ONE interstate 4 lane highway connecting the area.

Pulaski has been the highway money hog for years.

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Oh, Boy...having lived most of my life in the Delta of NEA, I do get a little offended when people say that area is "dying" and that they do not deserve good roads. My parents still live in Leachville and probably will until they pass away. Leachville is a small town, about 1900 people, located 25 miles from Blytheville and 32 miles from Jonesboro and 22 miles from Paragould...basically, if you live in Leachville you are 30 minutes away from: Walmart, a theater, a hospital, or a decent chinese buffet.

Most people in Leachville commute to the steel mills in Blytheville or to other places of work in Jonesboro with Highway 18 being the main route between Leachville and those two towns. For years Highway 18 has been a dangerous and overcrowed two-lane road and I can't tell you the number of times I have seen accidents or near accidents. Yet, people have to use this road to get to their gainful employment in a "dying" part of the State. They deserve a good highway system just as much as LR or Fayetteville.

Also, people coming in from Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisianna, Missouri have to travel through the "dying" part of the State to get to the "alive" parts of the State. Why make these business people, tourists, and truck drivers suffer on crappy roads? Good rural roads also stimulate tourism...I know many motorcyclists who come to Arkansas and spend quite a lot of money here and one of the reasons is because they want to ride our rural roads which in the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains which are nationally famous.

Many of you may not know that HWY 70 is being resurfaced...and if ever there was a road in this area that needed work it is that one.

>>We're going to need a four-lane with lots of lights and bells and whistles around our new electric power plant at McNab.<<

Louie, what you are going to need are transmission line monitors. You know the guys who keep watch over 95% of the electricity generated which will flow to Texas where sulfur belching electric plants are not permitted to be built.

Yes, NWA has a WTC. It is that huge building off 540 paid partly through your tax dollars solely to benefit private corporations and which sits there practically empty because of the problem getting people to rent space.

Oh yeah Louie, I hope SWEPCO-AEP sends out bottles of Vaseline with every increase in utility bills to dumbasses like you. We get to pay for improvements in Texas' lectricity supply.

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>>that huge building off 540 paid partly through your tax dollars solely to benefit private corporations<<

You think the rice farmers are paying all their own costs? You think the Cotton Council is paid for by member's fees? You ever heard of crop subsidies? Allotment payments? That means you get paid for NOT growing. That dab the NWA WTC gets is a drop in the bucket to ONE of Congressman Berry's incorporated farms' gratuitous checks.