Political Smoke

Okay ... it's an election year, so as can be expected in my line of work I've been seeing a lot of political garbage. We do a lot of post production work for various political candidates around the country in our little facility, and I get to work on most of them. As I've said before this has made me a tad bit jaded as can be expected ... it also helps me see a little more of the political smoke that these candidates blow in our face hoping to obscure our vision as election time approaches.

I bring this up because I just worked on a job for a candidate (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) last week that was all upset because his opponent (the incumbent) had voted against an increase in taxes to fix a bridge, and instead proposed allowing a private firm to fix the bridge and charge a toll to recoup the cost of the repairs over 5-10 years.

OMG ... we can't allow private companies to do things, people might get the idea that they are responsible and ... gasp ... can do things better than the government.

His statement that 'working people shouldn't have to pay a toll to go to work' will probably play well ... but it's just smoke. His plan, for example, is to add a 'temporary' 1% increase to the state sales tax to pay for the repairs over the next 5 years ...

Now I want to take a quick poll ... when was the last time that you heard of such a 'temporary' measure ending? I can tell you here in GA there was a big stink not long ago when ... after 5 years ... the temporary tax increase that was supposed to retire wasn't. Why? because the State government (much like the federal government) can't cut spending to save their own mother's life. They aren't going to lower taxes (particularly a sales tax) and loose that revenue stream ... they just come up with a new project to spend the money on .... like repaving sections of SR211 that they just completely resurfaced 2 years ago and that don't so much as have a crack in them.
In short ... under his plan the repairs will be finished in 5 years ... after which point they'll come up with some other justification for keeping the additional 1% tax. Chances are that the work done by the state crews will be inferior to the work that would have been done by the private firm ... will likely cost more ... and take longer to get finished (snarling up traffic longer).

Why do I say that? Simple ... Government has zero motivation to do things quickly or efficiently ... or correctly for that matter. In fact ... most government motivation comes from adding more jobs to the government payroll and, thus, increasing their own loyal army of government workers .... what government worker is going to vote for someone that wants to cut spending, cut government employment, or otherwise actually do the things that need to be done to actually get the government back under control?

Now ... could a toll on the bridge go longer than the set time? Not if the government does it's job in the matter. There is the matter that the people paying for the bridge repair would be the people using the bridge as well ... not some family on the other side of the state that may never even be in the city, much less drive across the bridge.

This goes back to the intended role of government ... and the fact that we've lost sight of that roll. The people that should be responsible for the maintenance of the bridge are, indeed, those people whose lives are impacted by the bridge. We've gotten so used to the fact that we pay for anything and everything in this country in some way, shape, or form, that we just accept that the government is going to take our money and use it to do things that we may not agree with in a completely different state, that we don't think a thing about the state taking our money to use in a different city ...

Likewise people feel that they are entitled to have their lives 'enriched' through the money of others in this country .... a lot of things that should be handled on a state or local level have been passed up to the federal government .... so instead of paying the State tax for the things that the State needs to do ... you pay a little to State and a lot to the Federal so that the Federal money can be fought over and divided up and then sent to the State ... causing, by the nature of such things, additional waste through additional payroll and time loss.

Why has it come to this? Simple ... this way we can pretend that our little city isn't paying for the 5 million dollars in road work ... we're only paying a portion of it and the Federal government is paying the rest of the bill ... of course in reality we're probably paying more than we would be if we paid for the whole thing ourselves.