Associated Press: “Stymied in Congress, the Obama administration is moving unilaterally to clamp down on greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for new power plants and oil refinery emission standards over the next year.”
If you want the best example ever of how the United States has gone from a country of freedom and limited government to a country that is a nanny state and government control of everything, here it is. The federal Highway Administration issued a regulation that requires every street sign in the United States to contain upper and lower case letters. The bureaucrats say it will make it easier for people to read street signs while driving. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had a problem reading street signs because the letters were in all capital letters. Whenever a street sign is hard to read it is because the sign is too small, not because of the lack of lowercase letters.
All the street signs in Phoenix, Arizona, are entirely in all capital letters. Big brother says no, no, no. The signs must have upper and lower case letters. For example, CAMELBACK RD is now a violation of federal law. The street sign must read Camelback Rd. The cost to replace all the street signs in Phoenix – over $11.5 million the city does not have to replace 320,000 signs. The cost for all the cities in the U.S. to comply must be in the mega billions. As my beloved cartoon character Pogo said many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Big Government: “Ever since this continent was electrificated, Americans have been allowed to plug anything they want into their own electrical outlet. . . . When President Bush signed The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 we saw the first limits on which appliances we can use in our homes. . . . The next step in Green won’t even require Congressional approval. The Department of Energy recently decided they have authority over appliances in your home. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently issued five new energy efficiency standards for large appliances, and is reworking the policy to include ten new categories.”
See “Energy Department Says It Has ‘Mandate’ to Force ‘Market Transformation’ for Household Appliances.”
The Arizona Republic reports that a group of idiots called the Southwest Valley Rail Partnership got together recently during these dire economic times to discuss how they can convince elected officials to take government deeper into debt to purchase the money losing sink hole called passenger railroads. These people are not interested in learning the facts that passenger rail in the United States cannot make money, but they do love railroads and spending other people’s money on railroads that few people will ever use. If you don’t believe that passenger rail is a big money loser, read these articles:
1. Government-Run Rail System Losing $32 per Passenger, Study Shows
2. High Speed Rail Going Nowhere Fast
3. Money train: The cost of high-speed rail
“It is a fact that no nationwide passenger rail system anywhere in the world is considered profitable when all costs — including capital — are accounted for,” . . . “Amtrak released a study in April to demonstrate that Europe’s system is heavily subsidized. Germany’s high-speed rail network, the most expensive in Europe, required average annual subsidies of $11.6 billion during the 10-year span that ended in 2006, according to the Amtrak study.”
CNBC: “According to an IRS study last year, [federal] employees and federal retirees owed a staggering $3.3 billion dollars in delinquent tax payments to the government.”