For Sale:
For Sale:
Beautiful highway systems in a rural setting in southwest Wisconsin. 2-lane and 4-lane models available. Publicly financed, publicly maintained, but privately owned! Owner obtains the right to arbitrarily establish toll fares. Be the first foreign country in your neighborhood with your own American boondoggle. Bad Credit or No Credit? No worries; we finance!
Sounds awfully silly, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's happening in America today. Paul Soglin has the details.
http://www.waxingamerica.com/2006/07/america_for_hig.html
I highly recommend you read Paul's article. It's rather disconcerting.
I don't generally like the "left vs. right" debate, because it over-generalizes things. I like to address issues on their own merit. But this is pretty damning evidence that the philosophy of the "right-wing neocons" is disastrous. Their tunnel-visioned approach to reducing the size of government and cutting spending leads to idiotic soultions such as selling off America's infra-structure to foreign entities. Utilities. Highways. Ports. What's next?
Does the concept of a sovereign nation mean anything at all to them? Dare disagree with them and they hurl insults and question your patriotism. They call you America haters. And to demonstrate how much more they love America than you, they sell it off? To show you how much more patriotic they are than you, these paper mache' patriots sell off your assests to the highest bidder? Absolutely deplorable!
What's next? You can damn well bet that schools are next in line. As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, the right-wing has an easily palpable contempt for education. They want to under-fund it, privatize it, make it unaccountable, and then profit from it. And they do so with very little regard for the social fabric.
We see it already in Wisconsin. In the last budget, as I've again mentioned in other blogs, the Republican budget proposal provided only a 1% increase in public school funding. Say what you want about Governor Doyle, but he came up HUGE for our school districts in the last budget. To the tune of around $400 million dollars more than the right-wingers proposed. Of course, the right-wingers cried and whined because he had to cut out some of the "hard earned" pork projects they earmarked for their lobbyists. But he honored the state's committment to fund 2/3 of the states public education. And he cut state spending in the process!!
Further compounding this is the fact that the right-wing is pushing for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. They called it TABOR until they found out that people hated it and deemed it a poor idea. So they changed the name to Taxpayer Protection Ammendment. (such a beautiful and noble name, don't ya think?) But no matter what they call it, it is still an extremely flawed concept.
Had TABOR passed, (or TPA, or Bride of TABOR, Sister of TABOR, or whatever you call it) it would have crippled local, municipal, and school governments, hospitals and clinics, and businesses. The affect would be that TABOR would impose spending caps on what the state could spend on local governments. Anything above the cap, and property taxes would have to be raised to pay for it. In a nutshell, it would free the state of it's funding obligations while still allowing them to dish out pork for their pet projects. Rural areas would get hurt the worst. And then the domino effect starts. Property taxes shoot through the roof. Taxpayers get upset. So to ease the tax burden, government privatizes roads, schools, utilities, etc. Residents pay through the teeth in fees that the private entities charge for basic services. Services become monopolies, and we lose our personal freedoms. All because right-wingers hate government that doesn't generate personal wealth and keep them in power.
Make no mistake; the idea of TABOR is not going away. The Republican leadership has vowed to bring it back up in the next session. It passed in the Assembly, with Gabe Loeffelholz casting the deciding vote to cripple local government. It failed in the Senate, but they will be back, unless they don't have the majority in the Assembly.
I don't think Loeffelholz and his fiscally irresponsible cohorts should have a second chance to pass this disaster, do you?
Time for a change!
Beautiful highway systems in a rural setting in southwest Wisconsin. 2-lane and 4-lane models available. Publicly financed, publicly maintained, but privately owned! Owner obtains the right to arbitrarily establish toll fares. Be the first foreign country in your neighborhood with your own American boondoggle. Bad Credit or No Credit? No worries; we finance!
Sounds awfully silly, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's happening in America today. Paul Soglin has the details.
http://www.waxingamerica.com/2006/07/america_for_hig.html
I highly recommend you read Paul's article. It's rather disconcerting.
I don't generally like the "left vs. right" debate, because it over-generalizes things. I like to address issues on their own merit. But this is pretty damning evidence that the philosophy of the "right-wing neocons" is disastrous. Their tunnel-visioned approach to reducing the size of government and cutting spending leads to idiotic soultions such as selling off America's infra-structure to foreign entities. Utilities. Highways. Ports. What's next?
Does the concept of a sovereign nation mean anything at all to them? Dare disagree with them and they hurl insults and question your patriotism. They call you America haters. And to demonstrate how much more they love America than you, they sell it off? To show you how much more patriotic they are than you, these paper mache' patriots sell off your assests to the highest bidder? Absolutely deplorable!
What's next? You can damn well bet that schools are next in line. As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, the right-wing has an easily palpable contempt for education. They want to under-fund it, privatize it, make it unaccountable, and then profit from it. And they do so with very little regard for the social fabric.
We see it already in Wisconsin. In the last budget, as I've again mentioned in other blogs, the Republican budget proposal provided only a 1% increase in public school funding. Say what you want about Governor Doyle, but he came up HUGE for our school districts in the last budget. To the tune of around $400 million dollars more than the right-wingers proposed. Of course, the right-wingers cried and whined because he had to cut out some of the "hard earned" pork projects they earmarked for their lobbyists. But he honored the state's committment to fund 2/3 of the states public education. And he cut state spending in the process!!
Further compounding this is the fact that the right-wing is pushing for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. They called it TABOR until they found out that people hated it and deemed it a poor idea. So they changed the name to Taxpayer Protection Ammendment. (such a beautiful and noble name, don't ya think?) But no matter what they call it, it is still an extremely flawed concept.
Had TABOR passed, (or TPA, or Bride of TABOR, Sister of TABOR, or whatever you call it) it would have crippled local, municipal, and school governments, hospitals and clinics, and businesses. The affect would be that TABOR would impose spending caps on what the state could spend on local governments. Anything above the cap, and property taxes would have to be raised to pay for it. In a nutshell, it would free the state of it's funding obligations while still allowing them to dish out pork for their pet projects. Rural areas would get hurt the worst. And then the domino effect starts. Property taxes shoot through the roof. Taxpayers get upset. So to ease the tax burden, government privatizes roads, schools, utilities, etc. Residents pay through the teeth in fees that the private entities charge for basic services. Services become monopolies, and we lose our personal freedoms. All because right-wingers hate government that doesn't generate personal wealth and keep them in power.
Make no mistake; the idea of TABOR is not going away. The Republican leadership has vowed to bring it back up in the next session. It passed in the Assembly, with Gabe Loeffelholz casting the deciding vote to cripple local government. It failed in the Senate, but they will be back, unless they don't have the majority in the Assembly.
I don't think Loeffelholz and his fiscally irresponsible cohorts should have a second chance to pass this disaster, do you?
Time for a change!
1 Comments:
We can only hope "TABOR 2," or whatever it is being billed, meets the same fate as "TABOR."
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