Slowing development is the only way to maintain speedy development!

From Kaine's Address to the Joint Assembly.

I am proposing initiatives that will better link land-use and transportation planning. We cannot allow uncoordinated development to overwhelm our roads and infrastructure. This important and necessary step is not anti-development, but it recognizes that new thinking about development is needed.

Let's see here. You have two sides to this coin. On the face side you've got Virginia's economic development, which has exploded in recent years and everyone's standard of living is skyrocketing at an unbelievable rate.

On the backside is the traffic problem that's built up as a result. Now, between the booming businesses and the insufficient roads, which one is the government responsible for?

The roads you say? Why, that's a strange coincidence--they're also the ones that can't seem to keep up. It's almost like the government is ineffective at doing anything efficiently.

So Tim Kaine has looked at the prosperity we have enjoyed in our more business-friendly environment than our neighbor to the north (Maryland, not Canada--though them too, I guess), then looked at the government's inability to build roads fast enough to keep up...

...and he's come to the conclusion that the answer is to get the government to "coordinate" economic growth, since we now can see that it was so very good at "coordinating" the maintenance and expansion of the roads?

We must give local governments the power to control their own destiny and balance the benefits of economic growth while protecting their quality of life.

Ok, deep breath here...

...With lower unemployment, an increasing standard of living, great programs that both help pay for higher education and encourage people to invest in Virginia schools...I have to wonder what "quality of life" Governor Kaine desires to protect, exactly. Because as I see it, trying to slow down economic growth so that we don't attract too many jobs before we have more roads is a threat to the continued improvement in our quality of life.

Something is lacking in your perspective, I think, when you see traffic as a decrease in "quality of life". But then, maybe Kaine put it exactly right--his slow-growth ideas area all about "protecting" our quality of life. The one that we've already got. We won't get anything better, particularly as we're slowing down and other states aren't, and so businesses that are told they have to wait for new roads before they can come to Virginia will undoubtedly be content to find space elsewhere. So, no new jobs. Probably won't lose the ones we already had, but you sections of VA that haven't experienced the best of the boom yet, well, sorry. You don't get to. That might give us more traffic. And think of how stressful that would be.

I really hope Kaine gets nothing on this one, not an inch.