January 13, 2014

If there's one thing you can count on from Fox, once they've found a narrative they want to push, facts be damned, they're sticking with it. Neil Cavuto already went through this routine with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) back in December of last year, in one of the more obnoxious interviews I've ever had the unfortunate experience of watching from his show.

This Monday, he was back at it with former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, claiming that the government is squandering, or "stealing" our tax money for infrastructure and pretending that there's no accountability as to how the money is being spent: Fox's Cavuto Still Thinks Infrastructure Investment Is A Government Racket:

Fox News' Neil Cavuto continued to ignore the desperate need for infrastructure investment in the United States, repeatedly arguing instead that the government is stealing or misappropriating existing resources.

On the January 13 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Cavuto invited former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to discuss proposals to raise the federal gas tax to fund construction, repair, and renovation of America's crumbling transportation infrastructure. Rather than acknowledging the need to raise revenue to fund necessary projects, Cavuto made the unsubstantiated claim that federal, state, and local funds for infrastructure investment are being stolen or abused: [...]

The paranoid and unsupported claims made by Cavuto during the segment echo his comments from a contentious December 3 interview with Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). On both occasions, Cavuto claimed without evidence that "someone" in the government had "stolen," "abscond[ed]," or "[run] off with" billions of dollars earmarked for vital improvements to roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure systems.

Once again, the only proof that Cavuto provided to support his claims is the fact that American infrastructure is in a state of disrepair. As Media Matters has shown in the past, the dilapidated condition of America's infrastructure is entirely the result of insufficient funding, not the alleged fraud, theft, or misappropriation suggested by the Fox host.

Go read the rest for more info on just how desperately we need to be raising revenue to take care of our crumbling roads and bridges. I'm not sure how much worse they have to get before the likes of Cavuto quits pushing this libertarian claptrap. Maybe he'll finally decide it's worth paying a little more in taxes if someone he cares about dies because a bridge they're driving over collapses.

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