Privatizing Your Roads:

The Bush administration has been in a rush to turn everything public into money making private enterprises, including the federal highway system. They climb its ideology that's driving them, the belief that government (of the people, by the people, for the people) inevitably does things worse than Wall Street bankers. (I'm guessing you're aware of how the government is currently bailing out the banking system that's in danger of re-enacting 1929.)

Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu cover the attempted transportation hijacking in today's Washington Post. The Bush-ites claim that taxing fuel consumption is inadequate to the job of financing our roads and that doing away with the tax while forcing you to pay private speculators for the same right will be not only fairer but also more effective in generating revenue to maintain the roads.

Face it, if it costs a buck to maintain a stretch of highway, then it costs a buck regardless of whether the entity collecting that buck is the federal government through taxes or a Wall Street speculator or foreign business. The latter two, of course, must also collect some portion of the money as pure profit, taking that money completely out of the system.

So what's the real story? Speculators donate money to the Republican party. Government bureaucrats tend to vote for Democrats. The Bush administration is simply trying to shift money from some voters' pockets to other voters' pockets. In the meantime, just how efficient would such a shift be and we taxpayers and motorists be better off for it in any way? Considering what these speculators have done with the housing market, the banking system, and the so called War against Terrorism, which is little more than pork for the industrial portion of the "complex," you'd have to be a fool to trust this administration on anything.

The Layton/Hsu article is fascinating, if for no other reason than it describes the forces behind this insidious move: well connected Washington Republican neo-con lawyers with no background in civic planning or engineering, just a drive to hammer every peg they find into the same neo-con ideology.

Try these words of wisdom on for size: "I like the idea of people running for office. There's a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don't know, I don't know if that will be their platform or not. But it's—I don't think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you get break on the table." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 2005, about the Middle East elections.