Margaret Carlson Regrets Lack of 'Will' to Raise Taxes as '$4,000 a Minute' Spent in Iraq

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Time magazine veteran Margaret Carlson, now with Bloomberg News and The Week magazine, used the Minnesota bridge collapse tragedy as a fresh excuse to tout how the public really wants a tax hike while she regretted the lack of political “will” to raise taxes and that the government can't find more money for infrastructure but can afford “$4,000 a minute on the Iraq war.” Citing a poll conducted a decade ago when Democrat Ed Rendell was Mayor of Philadelphia, on Friday's Inside Washington aired on the DC PBS station, WETA-TV channel 26, Carlson claimed that “nearly 70 percent of people polled would pay more in taxes to actually know that they could cross the 14th Street bridge safely,” a reference to a bridge between Washington, DC and Virginia. “But,” she fretted, “you can't get the will to do it. I mean, we certainly had the wake-up call in Katrina, everyone knows the situation, but can you really get it done when there's, by the way, very little money left?”

A couple of quotes from Carlson on the August 3 Inside Washington, a show produced at Washington, DC's ABC affiliate, which airs it Sunday morning after it runs Friday night on the PBS station and Saturday night on NewsChannel 8, a DC cable news channel owned by the ABC affiliate:

The heart for fixing bridges, eh, not so much. Building a bridge, politicians like that. Mayor Ed Rendell, when he was mayor of Philadelphia, was chair of a group called Rebuild America, and found that 70 percent, nearly 70 percent of people polled would pay more in taxes to actually know that they could cross the 14th Street bridge safely. But, you know, you can't get the will to do it. I mean, we certainly had the wake-up call in Katrina, everyone knows the situation, but can you really get it done when there's, by the way, very little money left, as you [moderator Gordon Peterson] say?...

But, Charles [Krauthammer], as time goes on, the [infrastructure] problem gets worse. And we're coming up against it at the time when we're spending, what, $4,000 a minute on the Iraq war.