I suppose one man’s boondoggle…

8 October 2005, 1708 EDT

… is a local community’s big, fat welfare check from the American taxpayer.

My favorite part of the wire story?

Jack Shay, a member of the Ketchikan Borough Assembly who proposed the renaming the airport after Young, said he would have no problem deferring the funds for a year if the money is instead used on Gulf Coast projects.

But he disagrees with opponents who say the bridge is a boondoggle.

We’ve only been a state relatively short time, so we’re way behind the other states,” Shay said. “Don Young has been a great help catching us up with other states.”

More substantive posts forthcoming.

Filed as:

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.