Boston "on the city" becomes "on Uncle Sam"

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the Big Dig in Boston which should be mandatory reading in every 101 Poli Sci class in every school with a real curriculum [which narrows the field among higher education outlets in this country].

Mine was a [albeit minor] role among the victims resulting from the colossal concatenation of Boston commuter hardships this unforced-error of disasters. A delayed trip to Logan three weeks ago.

But my personal interest is more intense because I had recently read Howard Carr's book about Whitey and Billy Bulger, The Brothers Bulger, and had also met with one of my wife's relatives who had worked for Boston's gigantic Ponzi operation called its city workforce.

The Bulger book described the dream of every Southie in Boston's Irish ghetto whence the Bulger brothers sprang to be "on the city," meaning having a municipal job with all the permanence and slack duties these jobs entailed, including a lavish pension such as my wife's relative was afforded.

Being "on the city" meant every stoned-slacker's dream of having a job and not having [with rare exceptions] to actually do, as JFK memorialized it, "no heavy lifting."

Now the aftermath of "on the city" has become "on the nation."

The huge bureaucratic apparatuses built up over decades of Democrat tax-and-spend [Billy Bulger brags he can "slap a tax on a galloping horse"] spendthrift economics has caused instant rubble, a nightmare of collapsing infrastructure on "new" projects sloppily built with humongous cost overruns and shoddy materials. One observer called the Big Dig "an ATM for every Mass politician."

And this time, Uncle Sam has contributed to Massachusetts' addiction to massive tax subsidies, injecting many billions of out-of-state dollars into the Bay State's public arteries.

Besides the bloated senior senator and a bloviating junior senator, we can thank an entire in-state political culture of RICO-style schemes for the Big Dig fiasco. But this time around, the two senators from hell have conned Washington into padding and buttressing the bloated state government and its grandiose projects with national funding.

Massachusetts is slowly lurching into sort of overripe "Clockwork Orange" society, with politicized gangs extorting billions from in-state and out-of-state subsidies to erect gigantic concrete civic mausoleums.

Or in the case of the crumbling Big Dig, public-sector deathtraps.