Ferrari Mailing List: Re: Oil company bail-out

[Ken Rentiers (rentiers]

On Jan 3, 2009, at 10:14 PM, Rich wrote:

> WASHINGTON - Motorists are driving less and buying less gasoline,  
> which
> means fuel taxes aren't raising enough money to keep pace with the  
> cost of
> road, bridge and transit programs.
>
> A roughly 50 percent increase in gasoline and diesel fuel taxes is  
> being
> urged by the commission until the government devises another way for
> motorists to pay for using public roads.

What a crock of excrement. Our cities are going broke funding pension  
obligations to generations of outrageously compensated civil servants  
enjoying a cushy retirement from their do-little unionized sinecures.  
Teachers that didn't teach, sullen clerks and hapless drivers of  
broken buses.

In Texas state highways remain good to very good, but city streets  
inside Houston have become studded with pavement breaks and patches,  
steel plates and potholes as a result of subsidence (well water) and  
complete lack of maintenance. Some streets are near-on impassable for  
cars with sport suspensions and low aspect tires. I first saw this in  
Manhattan years ago, spies in SoCal tell me the problem is widespread  
in LA as well. Across the country our InterStates are falling apart.

Diocletian did in the Roman Empire when he abandoned their Gods. The  
radical Christian sects won. Roman civil society withered, the  
aqueducts dried up, roads and bridges became  unusable, halting the  
import of goods and supplies. The Mediterranean trade routes which had  
flourished for centuries were lost. The population had to abandon Rome  
to forage in the countryside for the next 1000 or so years as  
civilization ratcheted back to a feudal system of subsistence  
agriculture .

I get upset when I see that our cities can no longer manage to fill  
potholes, because they are so damn broke funding the accumulated  
overgenerous pensions of the uncivil service. Increasing fuel taxes,  
and all other taxes, is no doubt inevitable as our corrupt Washington  
pols fall all over each other in an insane rush to spend more and   
more trillions subsidizing their banking buddies and car manufacturers  
who cannot manage to build anything anymore that anyone wants to buy.

Left untrammeled, capitalism would soon purge the incompetent,  
avaricious and unsuccessful losers we call the Big Three.  By now we  
would be on our way to economic recovery. In a non-union car made here  
in America

Keynesian economics insists you can spend your way out of debt. This  
idea was discredited years ago in previous economic disasters, but no  
one teaches history anymore so who knows? Now we have elected a new  
collectivist cadre intent on massive expansion of government into  
every corner of the economy, using borrowed funds from hostile  
countries increasingly unwilling to buy our debt.

In summary: Moronic Associated Press Writer Joan Lowy! Stop parroting  
the treasonous snakes in elected office and look around. I am fairly  
certain that wile Rome burned an obeisant cadre of supplicant scribes  
struggled to come up with ever more florid turns of latin phrase  
complimenting Nero as he fiddled away.

Go Gators!

-ken-