While officials are still looking for the last body presumed to be in the Mississippi River after the collapse of the I-35W bridge, talk in Minnesota is how much--or perhaps whether--the gas tax will be increased.

In a special column I wrote for the Minneapolis-based Finance and Commerce (article not online), I predicted that the political winds would blow in the direction of a special session:

"It will be easy to demagogue the issue: Oppose the tax increase, and you favor dumping school children from decrepit bridges. ... But risk-reducers, beware. Will the money actually go into road construction? Or will it, in the style of bonding bills, go to pork projects?

Mitch Pearlstein, president of the Center for the American Experiment, lays out the major arguments offered against tax increases.

One: We spend enough on transportation but waste transportation dollars on earmarks and "nice but nonessential projects." (Pearlstein doesn't mention a light rail system that cost $750 million that goes from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis, so I just did.)

Two: Even with the various dedicated revenue streams going to transportation, there's still money in the general fund for transportation. That portion could be doubled and still amount to a modest 1.4 percent. "But when was the last time it was easy to increase one portion of the state's budget by taking so much out of other parts?"

Three: Public-private partnerships work, though they are "anathema to enormous numbers of voting citizens." The Center, by the way, is hosting a luncheon by Bob Poole, one of the leading experts on the use of private solutions for transportation problems. It's on September 5.

Pearlstein concludes: "While those who are intent on raising taxes would face a rough road, and properly so, their opponents -- surprisingly, perhaps, and to my regret -- may find themselves on a no less hazardous one politically. But if ever there was a time to rethink priorities, try new methods, stay within our means and change political equations, how can it be other than now?"

David Strom, president of the Minnesota Free Market Institute, reminds us of the dangers of letting politics having supremacy over science:

"The engineers - those people with the best expertise to decide how to keep our roads and bridges safe - were empowered to make the decisions they made on how to spend their maintenance dollars, and they were fixing the deck of the bridge, not the superstructure.

Should a politician have overridden that decision? Are politicians in a better position that the professional engineers we hire to decide what bridge to work on, and when?

Twin Cities residents will be aware of another bridge that has long been known to be more hazardous than the I-35W bridge. Yet it hasn't been replaced. The reason? Not lack of money, but .... political opposition to doing so.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal illuminated many of the wasteful uses of transportation dollars, thanks in large measure to one of Minnesota's own, who heads the House Transportation Committee.