Regarding your article,
”
Millions OK’d for Pacheco Y
”
, are we about to witness taxpayers being raped again by our
leaders in Congress? Congress once again is rearranging the deck
chairs, while refusing to navigate us a course correction.
Regarding your article, “Millions OK’d for Pacheco Y”, are we about to witness taxpayers being raped again by our leaders in Congress? Congress once again is rearranging the deck chairs, while refusing to navigate us a course correction. H.R. 3550, nicknamed “TEA-LU,” the latest six year transport bill, as we saw with its predecessors, ISTEA ($218 billion) in 1992, and TEA-21 ($257 billion) in 1998, is loaded with taxpayer-funded “pork,” but almost devoid of economics and logic. Trimming $100 billion, reducing pork-barrel projects from $5,300 to $2,800, but never addressing the fundamental flaws in our nation’s dysfunctional transport policy, amounts to poor leadership. You’d think our Congress would have us cheering their feeding an addict’s cocaine or heroine habit, when they should be curing the addiction. Debating which pork chops to bring home, while your house is burning, doesn’t make much sense to me. ISTEA, TEA-21 and now the likely successor reauthorization legislation, all were laced with ruinous public-sector transit. Mr. Justice Douglas reminded us that they did have “free speech” in the USSR, so long as nobody questioned their communist policy. Today our Congress will convert transit rides into “infrastructure,” but never debate the merits of the worldwide “privatization revolution.” According to Traffic World reports of the debate in the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee in the House, some of our leaders are even saying the “t” word (“trillions”), not satisfied with heaping billions of debt on future generations of taxpayers. Rather than end wasteful socialist transit, like the new Vasona Lite Rail being built now, or BART’s planned extension to San Jose, Congress would rather up the limit on their credit cards, and make our grandchildren pay for our wastefulness. If this is good transport policy, then Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were right. Hell, rather than give children the right to vote, we ought to give them an absolute veto power to halt our fatal spending disorder now before we wreck this Nation. Caveat viator.
Very truly yours,
Joseph P. Thompson,
Tres Pinos
