Dear Editor:
Regarding your article,
”
Millions OK’d for Pacheco Y,
”
are we about to witness taxpayers being raped again by our
leaders in Congress?
Dear Editor:
Regarding your article, “Millions OK’d for Pacheco Y,” are we about to witness taxpayers being raped again by our leaders in Congress?
As with its predecessors, ISTEA ($218 billion) in 1992, and TEA-21 ($257 billion) in 1998, the latest six-year transport bill 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 congressman would have learned a lesson from having supported deregulation of the utilities when he was in the Assembly. 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 re-authorization legislation all were laced with Jim Jones Koolaid.
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 world-wide “privatization revolution.” According to reported of the debate in the transportation committee in the House, according to Traffic World, some 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 outside of our congressman’s office windows.
Congress would rather up the limit on their credit cards, and make our grandchildren pay for our wastefulness. 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.
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
Submitted Friday, April 2 to ed****@****ic.com
