BIKE BUSINESSES are one of the few healthy vertebrae in the rotting backbone of Portland's economy.

For too long, those no-good "donkey party" louts in charge of our capital have turned a blind eye to the state's most important small businesses: bikes, which create jobs while cutting health care costs.

It's a proven fact, as reported on Republican Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's internet web blog, bike projects create roughly double the amount of jobs per $1 million spent than typical road projects. And yet namby-pambies in lefty-controlled Salem shit their knickers in 2009 at the thought of increasing spending on bike projects from a measly one percent of the state transportation budget to 1.5 percent. Horrors! Job creation! In Oregon! Heaven forbid!

Could someone from the Killing Growing Business (KGB) party explain to me why 155 businesses that create over $90 million annually for Portland, and employs over 1,150 people isn't worth even 1.5 percent of our state transportation dollars?

What are they spending that money on? Freeway interchanges. Ceaseless union-backed road paving. Fattening Columbia River Crossing planners' pockets to the tune of $117 million. Pork, my friends. Oink. Oink.

You know what I fear the answer is? The liberals have realized that investing in bikes will decrease health care costs. Biking is a silver bullet for killing the cost of Obamacare.

Swiss epidemiologist Thomas Gotschi performed a first-of-its-kind cost benefit analysis of Portland bike investment from this year. His findings? If Portland puts $138 million into bikes, encouraging all those unhealthy plebeians to buck up and pedal, it will result in a health care cost savings of $388 million.

Spending real money on bikes would, ultimately, move toward making socialist health care programs obsolete. As it is, health care costs for small businesses are rising, squeezing out the biking mom and pop. It's a conspiracy, I tell you—a genuine KGB conspiracy.