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June 1, 2005
The government is here to help ... open the wallets
Last week a U.S. Senate committee voted to increase the mandated use of ethanol in gasoline to 8 billion gallons annually by 2012. The House had already passed a bill for a 5 billion gallon increase, but the Senate, never to be outdone in its desire to spend other people's money, upped the ante. The reason they provided was the increase would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and help clear air at the same time. Best of all, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., asserted the additional cost to consumers would be only 2.5 cents per gallon. As usual, when it comes to the cost of any proposal she has ever supported her facts are based on outdated information that was never entirely relevant anyway. What was not well reported anywhere is the fact the 8 billion gallons of production of ethanol will, if fully implemented and sustained, reduce our dependence on foreign oil by a mere 5 percent in the years after 2012. Also, most gasoline users do not live in the new production areas so charges will be incurred to get the fuel to consumers. And nowhere did the proponents of this increase answer the question of what the additional cost at the pump will be to pay for the estimated $6 billon investment in required new production facilities. No matter what the project, program or proposal, elected officials have never, ever gotten the whole cost thing right. Whether it's a $3 million county administration building that ends up costing $6.5 million; a $60 million justice facility that costs $185 million; a $2 billion cross-town tunnel in Boston that costs $14 billion; or the $9 billion dollar projection for Medicare after 15 years that ended up being $81 billion, our government at all levels simply doesn't know how to protect our financial resources. Someday a very aggressive and un-indoctrinated journalist will investigate and prove government is the ultimate cause for increases in our cost of living. The task should be quite easy because for most of the 19th century there was no inflation of any consequence at all. Of course our government had almost no debt by today's standards, and was not allowed to spend more than it received. Then came the progressives, the enactment of the federal income tax and the removal of our monetary system from the gold standard. With the advent of government interventionism in our daily economic lives, the cost of doing anything began to rise so quickly that by the 1970s even government couldn't keep up with inflation, even with tax rates approaching 70 percent. The cries for relief grew so loud our politicians answered with probably the worst solution for any problem ever conceived, the cost of living allowance. Advocated as the solution to the long-term inability of people to keep up with inflation, this system did nothing more then institutionalize inflation into our everyday lives. A few brave souls tried in vain to point out that if the cost of living allowance was put in place everything would go up every year by an artificial number more in line with what the government spends than people earn. Thirty years of COLA increases proved them right. Never an institution to learn anything from history, the Nevada Legislature is doing the same thing to every property owner in the state with the absurd, discriminatory and probably illegal act to limit increases in property values and taxes to 3 percent - depending on who you are, that is. Much like COLA, this concept was not well thought out unless the real reason for the act was to find a way to increase government revenue by a baseline of 3 percent annually. Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but that sounds very likely to me. And what of the original purpose of the act? Wasn't it to put a limitation on property tax to help those who could least afford increases in the first place? Why didn't any of our representatives speak up and tell them we don't need another guaranteed increase in the cost of living? Why didn't the media challenge the Legislature to not only enact a bill to refund a portion of the huge tax surplus, but also to put safeguards to prevent such punitive taxation in the future? The truth is we will never be able to count on but a few of our legislators to do the right thing and allow us to spend our hard-earned money ourselves. For this reason more than any other, the time has come for us to get involved and do whatever it takes to enact a Taxpayer Bill of Rights for Nevada. Otherwise we will become inflation slaves to the state for generations to come. Little writes from Pahrump. His column, "The Other Side," appears here on Wednesdays. |
