sandy and the failures of blue-statism

By:

William McGurn

In:

The Wall Street Journal

Chapman University fellow in urban futures Joel Kotkin spends a great deal of time looking at which communities deliver and which do not, and he says it need not be a partisan issue. He cites Sioux Falls, S.D., which has a Democratic mayor in a sea of Republicans—and a fine new water-development system. Or Galveston, Texas, which maintains a huge seawall to avoid the kind of hurricane damage that killed 6,000 people back in 1900. Much of the nation’s best new infrastructure, he says—roads, bridges, airports, ports—has been built in “red” cities on the Gulf Coast and Great Plains with bipartisan support.