Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him.
--Art Buchwald

Last night I dreamed:
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If you want to keep driving your car, and you would like the roads to be passable, it is in your best interest to support a gas tax. It is not easy to find a way to fund road maintenance and building. Those who purchase gas are those who use the roads. The use is proportional: more gas-->more road use. It doesn't get any more fair than that. But people seem to think that the job of government is to give them something for all the taxes they have paid in the past. Sorry, bad news: those monies are long gone. The government is in a hole. If we don't give local governments some reliable way to pay for infrastructure, there won't be any.

In Madras, smalltown Oregon, the transportation budget has been supported up to now by hefty fees that were charged of developers, to be paid before construction began. Now the town is implementing a 1 cent gas tax, to be increased to 3 cents at a rate of 1 cent/year. The people are upset that the burden is being lifted from developers, and placed on their shoulders. What they don't seem to realize is that the developers aren't going to be building so much new stuff anymore. With people out of work and relearning frugality, developers will be shutting down operations and going to retire in the tropics. There won't be commercial projects to support big roads and fancy intersections. If we want to be able to get around on our roads, we are going to have to maintain them more at the local level.
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This morning they declared Multnomah County (the one I'm in, includes most of Portland) to be a federal disaster area. The news report was filled with city officials griping about how the snow had already cost the city $800,000 when the city budget was already strained. I think "disaster" is just a way for local governments to beg more money from the fed.
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The hill wins, most of the time.
For belly laughs, set the news video on full screen and fast forward. Add some frenetic music for mood.
=D

It's kind of like killing them with kindness. Obedience as a Radical Act by Butler Shaffer (link below) is about one approach to government regulation: utter obedience. By refusing to break any laws (and hence to pay fines), and by over-responding to any government requirements of us as individuals, we may put a financial and red tape burden on the state sufficient to force it to change tactics. Very interesting idea.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer170.html

Got my Oregon driver's license this morning. I passed the computerized driver's test with 82% correct. I didn't look at the rulebook, and took the test at high speed. The guy next to me had been working on it for a while, and when I started clicking up a storm next to him he sped up. The ones I missed were questions like "You should turn on your turn signal 50, 100, 150 or 200 feet before the turn?" I wanted to say "it depends".
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After three relatively easy days of driving I made it here to PDX. I'm moved in (more or less----well, more like less) to Brian's house in West Linn already, the Uhaul is set to be returned tomorrow.
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