President Biden vowed Tuesday to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it collapsed into the water when a cargo ship rammed into it, echoing what some Maryland officials said earlier but adding that he expects the federal government to foot the bill.
“It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “This is going to take some time, but the people of Baltimore can count on us though to stick with them at every step of the way until the port is reopen and the bridge is rebuilt.”
He said he spoke with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Tuesday morning, as well as Maryland officials including its congressional delegation and two U.S. senators. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg traveled to the Baltimore site.
I’m pretty sure they were going to do that with or without him. the party responsible for the incident should be the one fitting the bill
Yes, but ascertaining liability and securing a payout is a process that may take many years of being dragged through the courts, if it is even successful at all.
The government making money available immediately does help get things going with less uncertainty about who can foot the bill.
this is all good… the problem is that, with the issue solved, nobody will put pressure to get that money back
look at the BP spill, they barely took a hit on their profit margin and left a mess that nobody is looking at anymore
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Yeah that’s a great way to get an immediate injunction from a judge. That’s not how these things work.
they think the shipping company owns it’s cargo?
I seriously doubt people who say that kind of thing have thought this through for more than about 4 seconds. It’s like having a conversation with a Michael Bay movie.
Damn, I had to drop my phone so I didn’t feel that burn myself.
Unless you’re a pirate 🦜
I’m gonna ignore all the legalities that would have to be worked around to even attempt that plan, and skip straight to the final step of selling the seized goods.
Not sure that fire damaged and/or waterlogged goods are gonna fetch a good price. The ship burned, and partially sank.
Why didnt the bridge have insurance?
That’s the federal government
… why?
Bridges are fucking expensive, I’m not certain if the government will be able to recover a significant portion of the cost.
Someone doesn’t remember the 9/11 responder funding, hurricane funding, the rhetoric around COVID funding, etc. etc.
Footing the bill… but yes. Then again, maybe with the amount of shipping traffic a tunnel makes more sense.
We have two nearby tunnels. They’ll be packed now. But hazmat trucks and larger oversized vehicles can’t go through tunnels. There’s also a longer way around the northwest of the city, but that’ll be crowded now too. That’s where everyone lives. The bridge over the river was the interstate trucking corridor from DC to Philly up to New York and Boston.
The problem was the boat. It has done this kind of shit before in 2016.
The problem was the boat.
… and the bridge. Evidently there’s no safety structure around the support that would have prevented a ship from hitting the bridge.
They thought about installing bumpers but decided it was too expensive. Gotta wonder how the cost compares to replacing the whole fucking bridge.
Remember everything seems obvious in hindsight. I’m sure there’s a significant number of bridges with no bumpers have operated without incident for their lifetimes.
A significant number of bridges that would block a major port if they collapsed? I doubt it.
Pretty sure the HRBT down in Hampton roads could cause such a blockage. We live in a capitalistic society, why spend a dollar to protect for a risk that could only happen once every couple hundred thousand ships tends to be the usual thought process unfortunately.
…this is a joke, right? I don’t know anything about bridge engineering or shipping, but what kind of bumper could stop a couple-million-pound ship, even if it was unpowered?
Probably a large fender system designed to get the ship to slow down by breaking apart to absorb the energy.
Do you understand HOW BIG it needs to be and how deep the anchoring need to be to do that? It would be more expensive than building the bridge to not have single points of failure
The fenders on the SF Bay Bridge have successfully prevented damage to the bridge twice so far. Every bridge in the SF Bay Area has fenders to prevent exactly what happened in Baltimore. They work.
Wow, TIL. That’s amazing!
It was a 70’s bridge built to take collisions from 70’s boats of 1/3 the weight.
Bridges can and should be retrofitted as their use and environment change.
Well, that’s also a problem, yes
People keep saying “Key Bridge” and idk if they’re referring to the name or the fact that it’s a vital port for the east coast
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Thanks for the explanation for all of the non local people
Yeah I was just making a joke about the name
Thatsthejoke
The vital Key Bridge
Yes.
It’s the name.
I Live 20 mins from the bridge and it’s what it’s always been called. Way better than the full name in terms of efficiency lol
DC has its own key bridge, so it’s doubly confusing for that reason.
Well, obviously.
Its not like they are gonna go “you know what, it can’t fall any further, lets just leave well enough alone.”
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By himself, with fused vertebrae? Doubt.
They wouldn’t want reconstruction money coming from the $1b cop city project
Remember kids… ALWAYS socialise the costs!
Yeah, that’s how roads and bridges are built moron.
Well, axchually… toll roads and bridges are a thing. Even if they’re built by a gov’t that recoups its’ costs, I’d say that counts as a user-pay situation.
A toll is a kind of tax. There’s a one-time tax to build the bridge, and then a per-use tax to maintain it.
Is this satire?
If not, do you want to wait 20 years until the lawsuits against the shipping companies (yes, plural) are all done and appeals finished before you can extract a few million to cover part of the multiple hundred millions a rebuild will cost?
Infrastructure is too important.
You are so deep in the system, you can’t tell you are drowning
Go back to your bear plagued libertarian town
I get ya man, corporations steal constantly and when they break stuff we pay for it. The corpos won’t pay their fuckin taxes and then break shit.
“It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “This is going to take some time, but the people of Baltimore can count on us though to stick with them at every step of the way until the port is reopen and the bridge is rebuilt.”
Any minute now… Just like his other “vows”.
Also, crazy how the headline makes it sound sure to happen, and his actual statement is filled with weasel words.
Give politicians credit for what they do, not for they “vow” to do.
Give politicians credit for what they do, not for they “vow” to do.
Good point, and there’s a lot of credit to give to Biden on the economy, judges, infrastructure, and even some steps on climate change. So yeah, I think this bridge will probably be rebuilt as he said.
But you’re right- we know that because of what he’s done, not what he says. Always good to keep that in mind.
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It will surprise no one to know that 2/3rds of this is
total factual bullshit(edit: grossly misleading). I touched elsewhere on some of the big substantive things like wage inequality or emissions reductions that have improved dramatically under his presidency, but the homelessness I don’t think had been brought up. So:Homelessness has been going down steadily, and we’re nowhere near the 647,000 people record set around 2007. There was, recently, a big jump up between 2018 and 2020. I guess Biden really fucked up letting it get away from him during that time before we leveled off the growth again just recently?(Edit: This is 100% wrong – homelessness did in fact spike to record levels in 2023 after the end of that chart, when Covid aid ran out)- 2023 was, as far as I know, the biggest year for strikes in history. If Biden’s a strike breaker he’s doing a real shitty job at it. He did break the rail strike which would have done some amount of damage to the wider economy (you know, the inflation that some people like to blame Biden for?), but after that happened his labor department kept working the issue with the railroads and got the workers the sick days they were striking for in the first place.
Record oil production is accurate. I would balance that against the war in Ukraine, record inflation, his positive action on the emissions side which is the biggest single action a US president has ever taken on the climate… but yes there’s some amount of actual nuance and judgement there. The other two bullet points are
respectively purely made up andgrossly unfair, though.homelessness did in fact spike to record levels in 2023 after the end of that chart when Covid aid ran out
Hmm, surely the fact that the House went to the fascists who stopped funding COVID aid programs because they literally don’t believe it exists had no effect on the homeless population, right?
Oh, yeah, I definitely 100% agree that it wasn’t Biden’s fault, for that among a couple of different reasons. But that’s a separate topic from, did it even happen in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t saying you did. But there’s plenty of people who would say that’s Biden’s fault, when the problem (as was predicted at the time) was caused by Republicans in Congress. Just like how ending COVID stimulus programs threw millions of children back into poverty.
COVID aid was struck down December 2022 when Dems had the House and Senate
What is this - balanced, referenced comment with sources and corrections when new info came to light???
Don’t care about that other crap - Biden should get on to supporting this.
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Oh shit – yeah, you’re 100% right on homelessness, I hadn’t seen that. Mostly I look at sources that haven’t been updated for 2023 yet. But yeah that’s 100% accurate, I edited my comment.
So your railroad story is from December 2022 – i.e. right after the strike broke, but before there had been time for the labor department to secure sick days for the workers, including at the exact union that guy’s a member of.
Here’s another story about it.
Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, said: “It’s a significant set of quiet victories. It shows that it really makes a difference to have a pro-labor president.”
Here’s another from early on, and then here’s the update from June when 60% of workers had their sick leave.
Is that enough? Not really. I agree with Tormey’s anger about how he’s being treated, especially in December 2022 when the wounds would still have been fresh, and I’m sure on the whole balance he’s still getting fucked. It’s a goddamned shame. My point was more that Biden had the chance to break strikes on behalf of around 450,000 striking workers in 2023, and he didn’t. Why do you think he didn’t break any of those strikes?
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Ah yes, the famous propagandist’s trick of saying “Oh hey you’re right, let me edit my comment to reflect the new reality I just learned about.” I see them do it all the time, it’s a hallmark.
Quitting while you’re ahead for the moment, instead of being willing to delve into any of the other issues surrounding the claims you were making, does seem pretty wise though. I’d probably do the same in your position. Have a good one.
lol- digital equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying ‘NANANANANA’ ;)
Are you intentionally framing your thoughts and opinions in the most insufferable way possible? If so, why?
It’s like you could’ve made a decent point but then tried really hard to make it as disrespectfully as possible
You can just say, “I don’t have any valid points to make, sorry bye” instead of this absolutely pathetic comment. Talk about bad faith…
ROFL! You got wrecked.
Wow! This is the exact same thing even says to you seemingly everyday. It’s almost plagiarism!
lol- yeah really wish he’d stop producing so much oil, you know people hate that stuff ;)
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Yeah, Biden’s not going to resolve global climate change for you by summer so I guess you should vote for Trump or just stay home ;)
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Yeah nobody has ever died of exposure in Canada ;) But you have lots of fossil fuels to keep you warm… wait- weren’t you whining about that a second ago?
Wait i thought you wanted to hear what he’s done… not these other things you’re conveniently adding on after hearing what he has done?
Sea lions gotta do their “WHADDABOUT” thing.
I’ll never forget what he did to the railroad workers. Then he goes to a different union rally to pretend he cares about the working class. I guess the good thing was he made me see how powerless unions are in america, where there are extra harmful fees to going on strike.
Didn’t the Biden Admin keep working behind the scenes after denying that strike and help the railroad unions get the sick leave they wanted in the end?
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Which is what I tell people that insist voting matters. They respond to capital, something none of us have.
Jesus Christ dude, it’s been like 12 hours. What do you expect him to have done by now?
What would be cool is not use federal funds to repair a bridge a billions dollar company damaged…
If I drive into a house, me or my insurance has to pay for it…
But when a billion dollar corporation destroys critical infrastructure, our tax dollars pay for it?
Explain that to me.
Why do we pay for our mistakes and companies mistakes?
When do companies pay?
That’s quite a change from:
Any minute now… Just like his other “vows”.
In the span of two comments you’ve gone from complaining that he never does anything to complaining that be shouldn’t be doing this.
It’s almost like you’re not here in good faith…
It’s almost like sometimes there’s multiple bad things about a situation…
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So I’m confused…
You think this will be fixed quickly and taxpayers won’t have to pay for it?
Because that’s not what Biden said…
Have you read the link yet?
It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “This is going to take some time, but the people of Baltimore can count on us though to stick with them at every step of the way until the port is reopen and the bridge is rebuilt.”
Like, you’re calling me full of shit for what Biden’s saying
See there you go again with your weird fucking posts, who are you even talking to? You’re having a conversation with yourself and trying to stir shit up. Very inauthentic behavior.
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Yeah, but it seems pretty disingenuous to complain that Biden is simultaneously making empty promises but not actually doing anything while also wasting taxpayer money fixing a bridge.
Yeah, the government never wastes money to accomplish nothing…
It’s not like trump shut down the government a couple years ago to secure funding for a non existent border wall…
Side note:
Have you ever wondered about a Memento reboot where only one person in the world retained their long term memories?
Every one else just forgets everything after like 20 seconds and gets taken advantage of by a small group of psychopaths?
So, just to recap.
First, you complained that Biden is nothing but empty promises.
Then you complained that taxpayers have to pay for the bridge (if it was an empty promise nobody is paying for it)
Now you’re complaining that it’s all a waste of money and nothing will be accomplished anyway (do you think we, as a society, are incapable of building a bridge?)
It kind of sounds like you’re just going to bitch and moan no matter what.
I remember Trump shutting down the government. Do you think this situation is remotely similar? Does half the population not want this bridge in place?
If that remake does happen, you’re not the one that’s going to be keeping your memory. You can’t even seem to remember what point you were trying to argue when you can just scroll up and read it again.
Yeah, the government never wastes money to accomplish nothing…
So now you are certain the bridge will be rebuilt?
The company will pay eventually - it’s mostly about making the money available as soon as possible before the legal responsibilities are cleared up
The company will pay eventually
Hahahahhahaha, hahahhahaha…
Deep breathe
Hahahahahhahahaha
So the US Government should not make money available ASAP to rebuild the bridge, but instead wait for the laughable scenario that the company pays for the damages?
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The quick list is biggest single action on climate change in US history, estimated to hit a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030, $144 billion forgiveness of student loan debt, lowest unemployment in 20 years (or 50 depending on how you count) even after the Covid apocalypse which most countries haven’t even dug out from yet, wage inequality going down for the first time in I have no idea how long, Amazon paying $3 billion per quarter in corporate tax instead of the negative $1.2 billion they were paying before his corporate tax reform.
He vowed / attempted to do a certain amount more than that, yes, and getting that more stuff done also would be great too, but it’s not like he’s just been fucking off playing golf this whole time.
For what reason the news doesn’t highlight that type of stuff and instead focuses on whatever they focus on, I have no idea.
For what reason the news doesn’t highlight that type of stuff and instead focuses on whatever they focus on, I have no idea.
Easy, they want outrage. Biden following through on some mundane promise made some time ago riles up exactly no one, therefore it doesn’t get a headline. Modern media is extremely predictable in their approach.
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Ha, we’ll see. I liked the extensive copy-paste with its sourcing, but mods apparently didn’t like me copy-pasting the same huge comment into any thread where someone started up with “we all agree Biden didn’t do shit, it’s so well known I don’t even need to go into details, it’s definitely just something we all agree on…”. I do kind of get the objection to doing that, so I retyped it this time but still gave a link to the places the sources are found. We’ll see what the mods do with it.
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Not to defend politicians or journalists… But the headline is clear this is just a promise to act someday
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…
Have you just never heard the phrase?
It’s common in America.
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Joe could kick your ass right now
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he’s got your number and it pisses you off
Oh, there you go again
