United Liberty

An article in the Sunday, March 15 edition of The Birmingham News, entitled “Lots crumble and mud flows”, discusses some of the complications resulting from the plethora of unfinished housing projects that have been put on hold in the current economic crisis. The problems include excessive runoff and mud flows, crumbling roads without a final seal coat, empty houses in various stages of construction, construction debris posing safety hazards, and other various forms of pollution. Curiously, nowhere in the article does its author acknowledge that most of these housing construction projects are the result of a housing bubble.

Tonight as I write this, given that I don’t possess a television and find live-streaming an often frustrating experience on my lap-top computer, I chose to read a prepared text of President Obama’s first State of the Union address rather than listen to it live. Reading such a text can reveal more in some ways, as one isn’t influenced by the mellifluous tones of a well-polished politician’s voice.

According to an Associated Press report on Friday, President Obama has rejected the recommendation of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (who, by the way, is a Republican) to consider seeking a vehicle miles-traveled (VMT) tax as a replacement for the federal gasoline tax. A VMT tax would be levied based on the number of miles driven per vehicle, as opposed to the amount of gasoline purchased. A number of factors are said to be behind such an idea. According to the AP report:

Gasoline taxes that for nearly half a century have paid for the federal share of highway and bridge construction can no longer be counted on to raise enough money to keep the nation’s transportation system moving, LaHood told the AP.

To those “conservatives” who look to Rush Limbaugh as a spokesman for the cause of limited, constitutional government, this should silence any doubts as to where Rush stands when it comes to big government. His rant just about sums up everything that is wrong with what the “conservative” movement has become especially during the eight years of the Bush Administration (but clearly getting underway with the “Gingrich Revolution”). The so-called conservative movement is dead, and anyone who wants to understand why would do well to read Rush’s actual words here. I don’t think he was joking at all when he said, “It’s going to be a bigger, more powerful, stronger government — and we’re going to turn it against the left in ways they could have never imagined.”

Recent in the news has been former Senator Tom Daschle’s withdrawal of his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, along with President Obama’s additional nomination of him to a newly-concocted post of “White House Health Czar” (isn’t it interesting how increasingly popular the term “czar” has become in the government lexicon as of late?). The main issue that brought Daschle’s nomination down was his failure to pay more than $128,000 in taxes from 2005 to 2007 (which he ended up doing last month in the form of back taxes with nearly $12,000 in interest). Naturally this raised once again the whole matter of double standards over such matters, one for government officials (and others in positions of power or privilege), and another for everyone else. The President seemed finally to recognize that such a double standard would not serve him well, after noticing a disturbing pattern among a few of his other nominees.

The news is dominated by all the talk and debate of the so-called economic “stimulus” package, which, in the House-passed version is said to be $815 billion, while the version under consideration in the Senate is (not surprisingly) even more expensive at something closer to $900 billion. None of these figures take into account the true cost of the program when the interest on newly incurred debt is added (those figures have a range beginning at $1.2 trillion with a limit no one even knows).

Ron Paul was asked to respond to a particular passage in President Obama’s inaugural address, as it relates to our constitutional tradition, in which he states that “[w]hat the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” Obama goes on to qualify this by attempting play both sides of the small vs. big government debate, saying, “Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.